You are going to read three extracts which are all concerned in some way with providing a service
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| Test 1 PAPER 1 READING (1 hour 15 minutes) Part 1 You are going to read three extracts which are all concerned in some way with providing a service. For questions 1-6, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text. Mark your answers on the separate answer sheet. Fish who work for a living Cleaner wrasses are small marine fish that feed on the parasites living on the bodies of larger fish. Each cleaner owns a ‘station’ on a reef where clientele come to get their mouths and teeth cleaned. Client fish come in two varieties: residents and roamers. Residents belong to species with small territories; they have no choice but to go to their local cleaner. Roamers, on the other hand, either hold large territories or travel widely, which means that they have several cleaning stations to choose from. The cleaner wrasses sometimes ‘cheat’. This occurs when the fish takes a bite out of its client, feeding on healthy mucus. This makes the client jolt and swim away. Roamers are more likely to change stations if a cleaner has ignored them for too long or cheated them. Cleaners seem to know this: if a roamer and a resident arrive at the same time, the cleaner almost always services the roamer first. Residents can be kept waiting. The only category of fish that cleaners never cheat are predators, who possess a radical counterstrategy, which is to swallow the cleaner. With predators, cleaner fish wisely adopt an unconditionally cooperative strategy. 1 Which of the following statements about the cleaner wrasses is true? A They regard ‘roamer’ fish as important clients. B They take great care not to hurt any of their clients. C They are too frightened to feed from the mouths of certain clients. D They are in a strong position as they can move to find clients elsewhere. 2 The writer uses business terms in the text to A illustrate how fish negotiate rewards. B show how bigger fish can dominate smaller ones. C exemplify cooperation in the animal world. D describe the way fish take over a rival’s territory. Extract from a novel The Giordano painting 'I was up in town yesterday,’ I tell Tony easily, turning back from my long study of the sky outside the window as if I’d simply been wondering whether the matter was worth mentioning, ‘and someone I was talking to thinks he knows someone who might possibly be interested.’ Tony frowns. ‘Not a dealer?’ he queries suspiciously. ‘No, no - a collector. Said to be keen on seventeenth-century art. Especially the paintings of Giordano. Very keen.’ ‘Money all right?’ Tony asks. ‘Money, as I understand it, is far from being a problem.' So, it’s all happening. The words are coming. And it’s not at all a bad start, it seems to me. I’m impressed with myself. I’ve given him a good spoonful of jam to sweeten the tiny pill that’s arriving next. ‘Something of a mystery man, though, I gather,’ I say solemnly. ‘Keeps a low profile. Won’t show his face in public.’ Tony looks at me thoughtfully. And sees right through me. All my boldness vanishes at once. I’ve been caught cheating my neighbours! I feel the panic rise. ‘You mean he wouldn’t want to come down here to look at it?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I flounder hopelessly. ‘Perhaps … possibly...’ ‘Take it up to town,’ he says decisively. ‘Get your chum to show it to him.’ I’m too occupied in breathing again to be able to reply. He misconstrues my silence. ‘Bit of a bore for you,’ he says. 3 When he brings up the subject of the Giordano painting, the narrator wants to give Tony the impression of being A cautious. B resigned. C mysterious. D casual. 4 What is the narrator referring to when he uses the expression ‘tiny pill’ in line 12? A his shortage of precise details about the collector B his lack of certainty about the value of the painting C his concerns about the collector’s interest in the painting D his doubts about the collector’s ability to pay for the painting The invention of banking The invention of banking preceded that of coinage. Banking originated something like 4,000 years ago in Ancient Mesopotamia, in present-day Iraq, where the royal palaces and temples provided secure places for the safekeeping of grain and other commodities. Receipts came to be used for transfers not only to the original depositors but also to third parties. Eventually private houses in Mesopotamia also got involved in these banking operations, and laws regulating them were included in the code of Hammurabi, the legal code developed not long afterwards. In Ancient Egypt too, the centralization of harvests in state warehouses led to the development of a system of banking. Written orders for the withdrawal of separate lots of grain by owners whose crops had been deposited there for safety and convenience, or which had been compulsorily deposited to the credit of the king, soon became used as a more general method of payment of debts to other people, including tax gatherers, priests and traders. Even after the introduction of coinage, these Egyptian grain banks served to reduce the need for precious metals, which tended to be reserved for foreign purchases, particularly in connection with military activities. 5 In both Mesopotamia and Egypt the banking systems A were initially limited to transactions involving depositors. B were created to provide income for the king. C required a large staff to administer them. D grew out of the provision of storage facilities for food. 6 What does the writer suggest about banking? A It can take place without the existence of coins. B It is likely to begin when people are in debt. C It normally requires precious metals. D It was started to provide the state with an income. Part 2 You are going to read a magazine article about hippos. Six paragraphs have been removed from the article. Choose from the paragraphs A-G the one which fits each gap (7-12). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use. Mark your answers on the separate answer sheet.  When the hippos roar, start paddling! Richard Jackson and his wife spent their honeymoon going down the Zambezi river in a canoe.
Part 3 You are going to read a newspaper article about a novelist. For questions 13-19, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text. Mark your answers on the separate answer sheet. The opera-lover turned crime novelist Through her series of crime novels, Donna Leon has been solving murders in Venice with great panache - mostly to the soundtrack of grand opera. Donna Leon first launched herself as a crime writer in 1991 with Death at La Fenice, which saw a conductor poisoned in mid-performance at the Venice opera house. ‘It was an idea that kind of grew,’ she says. ‘I had a friend at the opera house. One day we were backstage, complaining about the tyrannical conductor - and we thought it would be a laugh to make him the victim in a crime novel, which I duly went off and wrote. But that’s all it was meant to be. I was lucky to be born without ambition, and I had none for this book. Then I sent it off to a competition, and six months later they wrote back to say I’d won. I got a contract, and suddenly I had a purpose in life, a mission.’ To hear her talk, you’d think that until Death at La Fenice she’d been living in obscurity. Not so. She was a well-known academic teaching English literature at universities in the USA and Europe. But she found that she wasn’t really cut out for university life, and finally decided to walk out on it. ‘I’m a former academic,’ she says now through slightly gritted teeth. And it’s interesting that her literary reputation has been made through a medium so remote from the one she used to teach. ‘You’d be surprised how many academics do read murder mystery though,’ she adds. ‘It makes no intellectual demands, and it’s what you want after a day of literary debate.’ That said, Ms Leon is big business. She sells in bulk, her books are translated into nineteen languages and she’s a household name In German-speaking countries. ‘All of which is gratifying for me personally, and I don’t mean to rubbish my own work, but murder mystery is a craft, not an art. Some people go to crime conventions and deliver learned papers on the way Agatha Christie presents her characters, but they’re out of their minds. I stay away from such events.’ Leon also stays away from most of the other expected haunts of crime writers, like courtrooms and police stations - ‘I’ve only known two policemen, neither of them well,’ - which accounts for the absence of technical legal detail in the books. What’s more, the few points of police procedure that appear are usually invented - as, she admits, they’re bound to be when you set a murder series in a place where murders never happen. ‘Venice is small, compact, protected by its geography - there’s really not much crime.’ Clearly the key thing about her murder stories isn’t credibility. Predictability comes closer to the mark: setting a series in a fixed location that the reader finds attractive, with a constant cast of characters. And that’s what Donna Leon does. Her unique selling point is Venice which, as the reviewers always say, comes through with such vitality and forcefulness in Leon’s writing that you can smell it. There’s a set cast of characters, led by a middle-aged detective, Commissario Brunetti, and his wife (a disillusioned academic). Then there are her standard jokes - often to do with food. Indeed, Leon lingers so ecstatically over the details of lunch, the pursuit of justice frequently gets diverted. The eating is a literary device - part of the pattern of each novel, into which she slots the plot. ‘That’s how you hook your readers, who like a kind of certainty. And the most attractive certainty of crime fiction is that it gives them what real life doesn’t. The bad guy gets it in the end.’ Indeed, when the conversation switches to Donna Leon’s other life, II Complesso Barocco, the opera company she helps run, she talks about baroque opera as though it were murder-mystery: fuelled by ‘power, jealousy and rage, despair, menace’ which are her own words for the sleeve notes of a new CD of Handel arias by the company, packaged under the title The Abandoned Sorceress. Designed to tour rare works in concert format, II Complesso was set up in 2001 in collaboration with another US exile in Italy, the musicologist Alan Curtis. ‘It started as a one-off. There was a rare Handel opera, Arminio, that Alan thought should be performed, and it became an obsession for him until eventually I said, ‘Do you want to talk about this or do you want to do it?’ So we did it. I rang a friend who runs a Swiss opera festival. We offered him a production. Then had eight months to get it together.’ Somehow it came together, and II Complesso is now an ongoing venture. Curtis does the hands-on artistic and administrative work. Leon lends her name which ‘opens doors in all those German-speaking places’ and, crucially, underwrites the costs. In addition, her publishing commitments take her all over Europe - where she keeps a lookout for potential singers, and sometimes even features in the productions herself: not singing (‘I don’t’) but reading the odd snatch from her books. 13 What is suggested about the novel Death at La Fenice in the first paragraph? A Donna based the plot on a real-life event she had witnessed. B Donna didn’t envisage the work ever being taken very seriously. C Donna had to be persuaded that it was good enough to win a prize. D Donna embarked upon it as a way of bringing about a change in her life. 14 The second paragraph paints a picture of Donna as someone who A has little respect for her fellow academics. B regrets having given up her job in a university. C was unsuited to being a university teacher. D failed to make a success of her academic career. 15 From Donna’s comments in the third paragraph, we understand that A she feels crime fiction should be considered alongside other types of literature. B she is pleased with the level of recognition that her own novels have received. C she regards her own novels as inferior to those of Agatha Christie. D she finds the popularity of crime novels amongst academics very satisfying. 16 Donna is described as an untypical crime writer because A she is able to imagine crimes being committed by unlikely characters. B she is unconcerned whether or not her stories appear realistic. C she has little interest in the ways criminals think and operate. D she manages to come up with imaginative new ideas for her plots. 17 Donna’s greatest strength as a crime writer is seen as A her avoidance of a fixed approach. B her injection of humour into her stories. C the clear moral message she puts across. D the strong evocation of place she achieves. 18 When Donna helped set up II Complesso Barocco, A she didn’t expect it to be a long-term project. B she saw it as more interesting than her writing work. C she had a fundamental disagreement with her main collaborator. D she was attracted by the challenge of the first deadline. 19 In what way is Donna important to II Complesso Barocco? A She provides essential financial support. B She oversees its day-to-day organisation. C She helps as a translator. D She organises the recruitment of performers. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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