Modelo examen 9 – 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.

Walls and wall building have played a very important role in Chinese culture. These people, from the dim mists of prehistory have been wall-conscious; from the Neolithic period – when ramparts of pounded earth were used – to the Communist Revolution, walls were an essential part of any village. Not only towns and villages; the houses and the temples within them were somehow walled, and the houses also had no windows overlooking the street, thus giving the feeling of wandering around a huge maze. The name for “city” in Chinese (ch’eng) means wall, and over these walled cities, villages, houses and temples presides the god of walls and mounts, whose duties were, and still are, to protect and be responsible for the welfare of the inhabitants. Thus a great and extremely laborious task such as constructing a wall, which was supposed to run throughout the country, must not have seemed such an absurdity.

However, it is indeed a common mistake to perceive the Great Wall as a single architectural structure, and it would also be erroneous to assume that it was built during a single dynasty. For the building of the wall spanned the various dynasties, and each of these dynasties somehow contributed to the refurbishing and the construction of a wall, whose foundations had been laid many centuries ago. It was during the fourth and third century B.C. that each warring state started building walls to protect their kingdoms, both against one another and against the northern nomads. Especially three of these states: the Ch’in, the Chao and the Yen, corresponding respectively to the modern provinces of Shensi, Shanzi and Hopei, over and above building walls that surrounded their kingdoms, also laid the foundations on which Ch’in Shih Huang Di would build his first continuous Great Wall.

The role that the Great Wall played in the growth of Chinese economy was an important one. Throughout the centuries many settlements were established along the new border. The garrison troops were instructed to reclaim wasteland and to plant crops on it, roads and canals were built, to mention just a few of the works carried out. All these undertakings greatly helped to increase the country’s trade and cultural exchanges with many remote areas and also with the southern, central and western parts of Asia – the formation of the Silk Route. Builders, garrisons, artisans, farmers and peasants left behind a trail of objects, including inscribed tablets, household articles, and written work, which have become extremely valuable archaeological evidence to the study of defence institutions of the Great Wall and the everyday life of these people who lived and died along the wall.

1) Chinese cities resemble a maze due to the fact that the houses have no external windows.

2) Constructing a wall that ran the length of the country was an absurdly laborious task. 

3) The Great Wall of China was built by the Ch’in, the Chao and the Yen.

4) Crops were planted along the canals. 

5) The Great Wall helped build trade in China and abroad. 

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) Like other reception class mothers, I peeked at her friends’ bookbags to see if the books they were reading were more advanced. Invariably they were. My growing anxiety was assuaged by a wise fellow mother remarking that my exuberant child was busily engaged in things, like pretend games and drawing, which delighted her more. She also loves books, but often pleads for the right to be able to make up her own stories to the pictures (frequently more exciting than those by the author).

B) Those who consider such reservations a middleclass luxury should look at Europe. We’re alone in bullying children to read so young. The Norwegians don’t start until they’re seven, when it’s usually painless. Sylvia Hopland, headteacher of the Norwegian School in London, says: «We know that we could teach children to read at four, but we want them to spend those years playing. We want to teach them to solve problems, cooperate with others and cope with life.»

C) Imagine the blow that might have dealt to his creative genius. Also, one problem with exerting such pressure on pre-school children is that it can make children resistant to reading. Once affecting extravagant interest in my second daughter’s new book-title, I was rewarded with: “You’re just trying to get me to read it and I won’t.»

D) When I asked her to tell me what she thought of her classes, she was unabashedly sincere: «I like books with pictures, but books with too many words are boring.» My immediate urge was to force her, threaten her or coax her nose into her books. Until it suddenly occurred to me: at what age did I start reading?

E) For the best part of a year I lugged her wretched bookbag to and from school without opening it, and resolved as far as possible to follow her own reading timetable. Her reception teacher adopted what today is a rare, daring stance: there isn’t much you can do to make a child read before they’re ready.

F) Being against it, is like being against vitamins or bank holidays – completely perverse. Among the over half-million web pages devoted to teaching children to read, none of those I browsed are on learning to read too soon.

G) The obsession with reading has led to a major decline in the time and energy given over to music, art and drama. And the heresy that dare not speak its name is that children are being pressurised to learn to read too early.

H) Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are not obliged to express their entry requirements in terms of tariff points. Those that do may additionally require some or all of the qualifications for entry to be in specific subjects and at specific grades. An applicant who meets the published minimum admission requirements for a particular programme may be offered a place, but this is not guaranteed. Entry is competitive, with wide variations between institutions and programmes in terms of the competition for places.

You can make me do it, but you can’t make me like it

A good news story about education? It sounds like an oxymoron, but blazoned on Monday’s front pages was the finding of a major new international survey that ‘UK pupils move close to top of world class’, especially in reading. This will have been gratifying to a government for whom ‘education, education, education’ increasingly seems to be a euphemism for ‘reading, reading, reading’. But such singlemindedness has had other, unacknowledged consequences.

Traditionalists, however, maintain that you’re never too young to learn to read: on the contrary, the earlier the better. Reading, and especially early reading, is considered so self-evidently good that children are coaxed, pressed and, if required, bribed into submission. 

But in other schools there’s no shortage of horror stories, like the parents of four-year-olds paying for coaching to help them keep up with the fast readers. The mother of a four-and-a-half-year-old was told that her son had to apply himself to reading because the school didn’t want him to end up at the bottom of the pile. Einstein may have learned to read only at 10, but today he’d be stigmatised and in remedial class.

Other parents are more successful in their efforts, yet all children get there in the end. What counts, surely, is how they do so, since this is paramount for future pleasure. You can, just about, drill children into learning to read, but you can’t compel them to enjoy it. In a culture increasingly obsessed with what is measurable, what a pity reading pleasure can’t be tested.

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 is it mentioned that…

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

1) A story in which someone is unaware of the impact of their action. 

2) A description of the opening scene. 

3) A hint that the author’s future writing career will be positive. 

Which text is saying the following?

4) A book that would be appreciated by people without much previous knowledge of the subject.

5) An appetising book based on a parallelism between food and literature. 

6) A meaningful thrust to housewives.

7) A reminiscence of a classic role yet better accuracy. 

Part 4

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

Aeroponics; feeding tomorrow’s world?

According to a United Nations FAO report published in 2011, almost half of the fruit and vegetables produced in the world go to waste – they never get consumed by the humans for whom they are grown.

Wastage occurs throughout the production and distribution cycle, during production, during transformation, during transport, and even – notably in developed economies – after purchase by the final customer.

Fifty percent of all fruit and vegetables are going to waste, that is an enormous amount of wastage,  and not just in economic terms.  This wastage has a huge impact in terms of natural resources, particularly space and water, which in turn have huge implications for the global environment.

Cutting out all waste in the production and distribution of food is an impossible goal. Even people living in small eco-sustainable communities generate waste. Even in organic crop production, pests and disease cause wastage; and even if harvested and distributed locally, part of a crop will always be wasted.

But there is a large difference between wasting fifty percent of all fruit and vegetables produced worldwide, and the unreachable goal of achieving no waste at all. Between 50% and zero, there is plenty of scope for significantly reducing the volume of food waste worldwide simply through the use of new more efficient production methods.

Studies have shown that packaging and distribution systems account for about 25% of total wastage of fresh fruit and vegetables, leaving plenty of opportunity for improvement. In an ideal world, and as in the past, much of the food consumed in cities would be produced locally, not shipped thousands of miles as happens today.

In 1998, the US Department of Agriculture released a study into fruit and vegetables arriving at the Chicago Terminal Market, the main point of distribution for the American Middle West. The report showed that basic vegetables including lettuce, broccoli, peas or cauliflowers all traveled over 2000 miles (over 3000 km) before reaching the market… and before being shipped on to supermarkets across the region. Yet Chicago is in the heart of a massive agricultural area. Granted it can get pretty cold in winter, but with modern agricultural techniques, the Midwest could be self-sufficient for many types of fruit and vegetables, cutting out the massive environmental cost of shipping tons of vegetables halfway across a continent.

Since 2011, Chicago’s O’Hare airport has been home to an aeroponic garden, where people can see how vegetables can be grown in an environment that is not only without soil but even without any permanent medium in which to grow. In this experimental garden, plants are grown, as the name suggests, … in the air, their roots hanging down in nothing.

Hydroponics, growing plants in troughs of nutrient-rich water, has been developing since the 1970’s. Aeroponics takes things one step further, by removing the water and replacing it with air. Not just air, obviously; while plants are grown with roots hanging in the air, these roots are regularly sprayed with a nutrient-rich solution that gives them just what they need for optimum growth. It’s very high-tech, it’s not cheap, and it’s a long way from currently popular organic farming techniques. Yet in many ways, aeroponics is actually more environment-friendly than even the most strictly managed traditional organic farming methods. And it’s down to one factor: waste.

Traditional farming is wasteful; modern intensive agriculture relies on large inputs of external resources, notably heat, water and nutrients. The vast amounts of water used by agriculture are already causing serious problems in many parts of the world; beneath California’s San Joaquin Valley, the world’s most productive agricultural area, water tables have been dropping for almost a century, and scientists estimate that the land… not the water table below it… has sunk by over 8 metres in some parts. NASA calculated that Southern California had a «water deficit» of 4.2 gigatons per year from 2002 to 2015.

Aeroponic agriculture reduces water waste to zero. The only water used is what is actually taken up by the roots of plants when they are sprayed. Any water not used can be collected and reused.

The same goes for nutrients; in traditional agriculture, plants only extract a small proportion of nutrients from the ground, and good ground will have many nutrients in it that will not be used at all by the crops grown on it. In an age of diminishing natural resources, traditional agriculture uses millions of tons of chemical fertilizer each year, much of which goes to waste. In Brittany, France, many streams and beaches have been seriously polluted by nutrient-rich water running off fields, causing «algal bloom» along the seashore and covering some beaches in green slime. With aeroponic agriculture, no nutrients are lost, so there is no risk of unintended pollution.

One big advantage of traditional agriculture is that it almost always uses natural heat and light, even if under glass or plastic. Aeroponic agriculture, by contrast, may require artificial heat and light, specially if practised indoors. But with the development of small-scale locally-sited renewable energy production, and highly energy-efficient buildings and lighting systems, large-scale indoor aeroponic vegetable growing units are liable to be a feature of tomorrow’s cities.

If all the lettuces consumed in Chicago in winter could be grown locally, in carbon-neutral zero-waste aeroponic «farms», instead of being brought in by truck from California, that in itself would lead to a huge reduction in the use of water, minerals, land-space and transportation costs.  Reproduced on a global scale, reduced use of natural resources will be vital for ensuring a sustainable future for generations to come, even when the global population goes above 10 billion.

*You will have 8 questions in the exam. Here there are 10 for you to practice.

1) What has an enormous consequence in global warming? 

2) How could the great litter of food be reduced?

3) What city is in the midpoint of a massive agricultural area?

4) What is the aim of Aeroponics in comparison with Hydroponics?

5) Why does Aeroponics have so much quality?

6) In what way is Aeroponics better in comparison with traditional methods?

7) What is the main perk of Aeroponic agriculture in relation to water?

8) When does Aeroponic agriculture need extra light?

9) What could be grown locally in Chicago?

10) Why is it important to have aeroponic farms globally?