Modelo Demo – Reading

Part 1

Read the following text, then read the five statements. Some of these statements are true according to the text, some of them are false. Write T for True or F for False in the box next to each statement. 

The elements allowed me to go on living. The lifeboat did not sink. Richard Parker kept out of sight. The sharks prowled but did not lunge. The waves splashed me but did not pull me off.

I watched the ship as it disappeared with much burbling and belching. Lights flickered and went out. I looked about for my family, for survivors, for another lifeboat, for anything that might bring me hope. There was nothing. Only rain, marauding waves of black ocean and the flotsam of tragedy.

The darkness melted away from the sky. The rain stopped. 

I could not stay in the position I was in forever. I was cold. My neck was sore from holding up my head and from all the craning I had been doing. My back hurt from leaning against the lifebuoy. And I needed to be higher up if I were to see other lifeboats.

I inched my way along the oar till my feet were against the bow of the boat. I had to proceed with extreme caution. My guess was that Richard Parker was on the floor of the lifeboat beneath the tarpaulin, his back to me, facing the zebra, which he had no doubt killed by now. Of the five senses, tigers rely the most on their sight. Their eyesight is very keen, especially in detecting motion. Their hearing is good. Their smell is average. I mean compared to other animals, of course. Next to Richard Parker, I was deaf, blind and nose-dead. But at the moment he could not see me, and in my wet condition could probably not smell me, and what with the whistling of the wind and the hissing of the sea as waves broke, if I were careful, he would not hear me. I had a chance so long as he did not sense me. If he did, he would kill me right away. Could he burst through the tarpaulin, I wondered.

Fear and reason fought over the answer. Fear said Yes. He was a fierce, 450-pound carnivore. Each of his claws was as sharp as a knife. Reason said No. The tarpaulin was sturdy canvas, not a Japanese paper wall. I had landed upon it from a height. Richard Parker could shred it with his claws with a little time and effort, but he couldn’t pop through it like a jack-in-the-box. And he had not seen me. Since he had not seen me, he had no reason to claw his way through it.

I slid along the oar. I brought both my legs to one side of the oar and placed my feet on the gunnel. The gunnel is the top edge of a boat, the rim if you want. I moved a little more till my legs were on the boat. I kept my eyes fixed on the horizon of the tarpaulin. Any second I expected to see Richard Parker rising up and coming for me. Several times I had fits of fearful trembling. Precisely where I wanted to be most still-my legs-was where I trembled most. My legs drummed upon the tarpaulin. A more obvious rapping on Richard Parker’s door couldn’t be imagined. The trembling spread to my arms and it was all I could do to hold on. Each fit passed.

1) The narrator was being stalked by sharks.

2) Overall, the author feels quite snug.

3) Were the tiger to spot the author, the latter wouldn’t stand a chance.

4) The odds are against the tiger leaping like a bolt from the blue.

5) Much to his disgust, the narrator’s movements kept being rowdy.

Part 2

Read the text and fill the gaps with the correct sentences A-H. Write the letter of the missing sentence in the box in the gap. There are two extra sentences you will not need. 

A) Basically, mining gold and turning it into a coin was not worth the cost and effort to a counterfeiter.

B) Every paper dollar was supposed to represent a dollar’s worth of precious metal locked in a vault someplace.

C) Or was it? Because most coins were made of known materials, like gold and silver, you only needed to weigh one to know what it could buy.

D) Now, if you had a token that all the villagers could agree equalled the value of a bunch of carrots, a handful of nails, a dozen eggs or a loaf of bread, you’d be eating your breakfast in ten minutes instead of trudging around the village most of the morning.

E) Despite the lack of trains, trucks or internet connections, long-distance trade was a feature of the ancient world for a very long time.

F) And though you don’t want the nails he has to offer, perhaps the chicken farmer does. So, you make a trade.

G) And archeological evidence shows that Britain continued to trade with the Mediterranean region during the Dark Ages, centuries after the Romans left.

H) The coins would stay put, and the paper note would circulate from buyer to seller and so on—all without the aid of a mule or a visit to the chiropractor.

Carrots in your wallet

Let’s imagine it is the dim past and you are a farmer in with an abundance of carrots and a hankering for an omelette. With a bunch of carrots tucked under your arm, you stroll over to the chicken farmer next door looking for eggs. Sadly, he is in no need of carrots. So, you visit the blacksmith—he likes carrots.

The earliest coins we know of were issued around 2,500 years ago by King Alyattes of Lydia (in modern Turkey). They were made of electrum, a naturally occurring combination of silver and gold. Some sharp Lydian bureaucrat must have reasoned that, to avoid counterfeiting, money needed to be made of a rare material. Gold and silver were ideal because they were difficult (but not too difficult) to mine and were already considered valuable.

Money would have simplified these international transactions a whole lot. But, just like today, a standard world currency wasn’t available.

Part 3

Read the four texts below. There are eight questions about the texts. Decide which text (A, B, C or D) tells you the answer to the question. The first one is done for you. 

In which text does the writer: 

Example: An author who exemplifies source material with their own analysis.  D

1) Such theories are utterly twisted and adventitious.  

2) The sixties were the onset of the paranormal renaissance among the masses.

3) The average Joe was beguiled by UFO. 

Which text is saying the following?

4) Some UFOs believers defended radical and magnanimous abandonment. 

5) Non-religious individuals are provided accounts that take advantage of some fields of science. 

6) Some citizens became isolated and started to contrive a novel lifestyle.

7) The interest around unidentified flying objects has lowered in recent times.

Part 4

Read the article and answer the questions. Write a maximum of five words for each answer.

Agatha Christie shaped how the world sees Britain

For many, Agatha Christie is as quintessentially English as queueing for Pimm’s at Wimbledon. But as the best-selling novelist in history, her reputation goes far beyond the UK. Christie’s version of Englishness is “there to be played with, rather than grimly realistic,” says the University of Hull English lecturer Sabine Vanacker. As with other classic crime fiction, her settings and characteristics take some artistic licence and even have elements of caricature. In reality, of course, not every British village has a kindly vicar, a blowhard colonel, a brittle lawyer, and a twinkling doctor – or indeed a preponderance of murderers. There’s also a surprising lack of pubs in her stories. But not all of Christie’s version of Englishness is fanciful.

“The self-deprecation to me is what really comes through,” says Donovan. He sees something particularly English about the way Christie, either through her narration or her characters, uses dry wit, often gallows humour. In the short story Triangle at Rhodes, for example, she writes of one Englishwoman abroad:

“Unlike most English people, she was capable of speaking to strangers on sight instead of allowing four days to a week to elapse before making the first cautious advance as is the customary British habit.”

This kind of humour was very much part of the author’s personality, says Janet Morgan, (author of an official biography of Agatha Christie). Morgan explains that while Christie had strong beliefs about good and evil. “She was a very humorous person… She was amused by life, and by human beings, and by how they behaved.” We see this in Peril at End House, when Captain Hastings, the detective’s sidekick who is a stalwart, stolid emblem of Englishness, expresses misgivings to Hercule Poirot, the preening Belgian detective who is Christie’s most famous character. In Hastings’ view, a possible motive that Poirot has advanced is too melodramatic.

Poirot replies: “It sounds, you would say, un-English. I agree. But even the English have emotions.”

Like the other foreign characters in Christie’s work, Poirot brings English stereotypes into relief. Christie relies on certain stock traits for her characters of different nationalities. The French are hotheaded, Scots are thrifty, and Australians are simple. Christie, who enjoyed travelling both before and during her marriage to her archaeologist husband, brings an incisive (but sometimes xenophobic) wit to her depictions of them all.

The English are not exempt. One passage from Cards on the Table, which gently mocks English parochialism, says:

“Every healthy Englishman who saw him longed earnestly and fervently to kick him!… Whether Mr Shaitana was an Argentine, or a Portuguese, or a Greek, or some other nationality rightly despised by the insular Briton, nobody knew.”

Christie experienced English anxiety about foreignness first-hand. The biographer Morgan relates that during a journey Christie took to Baghdad, “a rather bossy, self-important Englishwoman almost tried to adopt her.” Christie was able to shake off her would-be protector and escape into the desert. She also came away with a template for writing a certain kind of English character who thought that foreign things were frightening and needed to be guarded against.

Morgan says that another trait Christie pokes fun at in her English characters is the “conventionality which prevented people, for instance, from thinking that the parlourmaid might have seen something or might indeed be a murderer.”

1) Striking though it may be, Agatha’s plots are devoid of…

2) What quality of English people is factual?

3) What generally considered unpleasant sort of jest is ubiquitous in her stories?

4) How much time shall go by before the English average Joe breaks the ice?

5) Who sarcastically depicts the English as impassive?

6) Who are portrayed as hasty by the best-selling author?

7) Who were looked down at by the Brits?

8) What could prevent the English to look beyond the end of their noses?