Modelo examen 10 – 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.

It was only minus 28 degrees Celsius when we landed in Irkutsk. But that was cold enough to make breathing an effort – the air felt like ice as it scraped the back of my throat. Five minutes later, I needed a second pair of gloves and pulled my scarf tight over my nose and mouth. I was obviously a beginner at this.

At the petrol station, Mikhail the attendant laughed when we asked if he wasn’t freezing. He’d spent the whole day outside with no more than his fur hat and a sheepskin coat for warmth. It was mid-afternoon and icicles were hanging from his moustache like Dracula’s fangs. He said he never drank to stay warm – unlike many others.

Vodka: There’s a belief in Siberia that enough vodka will insulate you from the cold. It’s been proved tragically wrong in the past few weeks. Dozens of bodies of the homeless or men walking drunkenly back from the pub were hauled out of the snowdrifts, frozen or so badly frost-bitten that many will never walk again.

The local hospital in Irkutsk is overwhelmed. Ironically, it’s the burns unit that’s taken all the frostbite victims – 200 of them in just two weeks in one town. Even here, icicles are hanging down on the inside of the windows, though the heating is on full power. The doctor was too busy performing amputations to talk to us.

Shortages: But we could hear the screams from the operating room. They’d run out of anaesthetic after performing 60 amputations that week. The other patients could hear it too, and one girl in the corridor, clinging to her mother for support, was near to tears.

Nastya is only 16. Last week she missed her last bus home, so she walked instead – seven kilometres through the snow, in temperatures of minus 40. She had no gloves. Now her hands are bandaged and hang down uselessly. She’ll find out soon if they need to be amputated.

She was far from the worst case. In one bed, Nikolai Dobtsov lay quietly staring at the ceiling. Underneath the sheets, blood was seeping through his bandages, from where his feet and hands had been amputated the day before. He was a truck driver, he explained, with a good job delivering wood – and recently there’d been a lot of demand. So he’d set out to deliver a last load upcountry. The weather forecast – just minus 25 in Irkutsk – seemed to suggest that the journey was safe. It wasn’t. His truck broke down miles from anywhere, and for 6 desperate hours he fought to repair the axle. He even greased his hands for protection, and finally managed to get the truck going again. Somehow he found the strength to drive himself back and straight to hospital, but it was already too late.

I asked Nikolai what would happen to him now. He just laughed, and shrugged. Nikolai has no wife or family in Irkutsk – and invalidity benefit is a pittance. Life in an institution may be the best he can hope for, and he’ll almost certainly never work again.

Resilience: That incredible stoicism is everywhere. In Irkutsk at least, people seem simply to accept that winter is harsh – and this one especially so. It is without doubt the cruellest Siberian winter in living memory. Yet outdoors, everything appears to function normally – even schools re-opened as the temperature rose briefly to minus 25.

The trams and buses are back on the roads, though everyone drives slowly to avoid skidding on the layers of ice below the grit. The main street bustles with people wrapped in layers against the cold. But even indoors, the chill is inescapable. After her shift as a tram conductor, Natasha Fillipova comes home to a freezing house. She shows us the bedroom – where ice has built up on the inside walls. She scrapes it off with her fingers, but that has little effect. One night, Natasha says, she washed her hair before going to bed. When she woke up, it was frozen solid to the wall. The children are doing their homework in the bathroom – the only room warm enough to sit in. Natasha doesn’t want to complain. But she is angry with the state and the architects for building shoddy houses.

The flats here are supposed to withstand up to minus 40 degrees. They don’t, and her children are ill with coughs and colds. Natasha’s anger is brief, and she seems faintly embarrassed about it. Siberians are used to cold weather, she explains. Here, she tells us, people prefer to rely on themselves – and the knowledge that eventually, spring will come.

1) Houses in Irkutsk can cause health problems for their residents. 

2) At the hospital there isn’t enough supplies and equipment. 

3) The local theory about vodka holds that if you drink it, you may suffer less from the cold. 

4) The opening paragraph says that the author was accustomed to cold weather.  

5) It is not normal to attend school at minus 25.

Part 2

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

A. Thus, it may be said, athletes who take drugs in order to enhance their performance do so simply in order to boost their «appearance money», their value to the organization, not in order to get their names in the record books.

B. The question ought to be what is good for the public. Some people want control for its own sake, and seek their own goals under the guise of being pure.

C. Depending on the sport practiced and the physical attributes it requires, the athletes will look for one or more of the following benefits of doping: recovering from an injury, increasing body recovery capacity after training, increasing muscle mass and strength, decreasing fat tissue, increasing endurance.

D. In 1973, Wimbledon’s profit on the open championship was under £60,000, with television rights producing 15 per cent. Ten years later, the surplus was £4.5 million on a turnover of just under ten million.

E. The winner was an American, Mary Slaney, represented by IMG, who was paid £54,000. The second and third in the race, Cornelia Burki of Switzerland and Ingrid Kristiansen of Norway, received £2,000 between them.

F. At the Wimbledon tennis championships, for example, corporate guests will get through 15 tons of strawberries. When you reckon that the caterers sell about 100gm of strawberries, with cream, for £2, you get some idea of the money involved. Overall, corporate entertainment in Britain is now a £50 million industry.

G. Even more absurd is the company marquee at Wimbledon: the company may have only ten Centre Court tickets, but they invite 50 to lunch. Guests are shepherded to and from the court in shifts so that they can each see a few minutes of play. Such an event may please those who like to stuff strawberries, cream and champagne, but it is not too satisfying for the person who only came for the tennis.

The Business of Sport 

Sport in the marketplace has been taken to its limits by what is politely called «Corporate Hospitality». It is also called, rather less politely, the «Company Binge». In its more extreme forms, it demonstrates at least three of the seven deadly sins, Pride, Sloth and Gluttony. 

The freeloaders are primarily interested in a day out of the office, in being able to say they have been to a «prestige event», and in being able to booze at their shareholders’ expense. They are not really interested in the sport itself. There they are, about a hundred of them, at an important race meeting, stuck in a tent about 20 metres away from the track, their salmon lunch digested, and launched upon their tenth case of champagne. Three uniformed girls go round collecting their bets so that the corporate guests, having spent a morning fighting their way through traffic jams, can now watch the race on television monitor screens. 

Of all the money-men in sport, the best-known and the richest is Mark McCormack. Mr McCormack launched himself on his career when he signed up Arnold Palmer back in 1959. That year, aged 30, Palmer earned $60,000. Two years later, McCormack had raised Palmer’s annual income to $500,000. By then there were Arnold Palmer tearooms in Tokyo. McCormack did not sit on his hands. Every year he travelled 10 times the circumference of the globe. He signed up the top players in every sport to be represented by his IMG, International Management Group. He created events such as the World Match Play golf championship. More importantly, he raised the income of tennis and golf championships, events much sought after by television world-wide.

Not everyone likes the activities of Mr McCormack, just as real race goers and tennis fans are not too keen on the company tents in which the champagne flows like water. The Office of Fair Trading has been concerned about the question of monopoly, that IMG handles both ends of the market, the event and the competitor. One critic has remarked: «Sport at the top is almost completely show business – the cult of the individual, more money and less sportsmanship, more emphasis on winning.» 

When it comes to appearance money, who gets what is usually a well-kept secret, but a women’s 3,000 metre race held in England in 1985 shows what happens. The race was staged very late in the evening so that it could be shown live on American prime-time television. The highest-paid runner, Zola Budd, was a white South African whose participation was likely to cause a minor riot in view of the world-wide ban on South African participation in international sport. For her publicity value, Miss Budd was paid £90,000. In the race, she came in fourth. 

Mark McCormack defends himself. He points out his effect on the game of golf, saying: «We’ve improved the game. We’ve take the British Open live to Australia and Japan and helped put up the prize money, I wouldn’t be presumptive enough to say I’m a saviour, but I’ve contributed.» He goes on: «I’m accused of multiple interests, but if I didn’t take the risks, for example with the world match play golf, there would be no event. I’ve not been secretive. I don’t pretend we don’t own certain aspects of golf.» He protests that he is accused of being ruthless, but he says that he is much more up-front than most. From his point of view, international federations don’t care about sport, they care about control.

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: have a different opinion from the others on the confidence with which de Botton discusses architecture? B 

1) Share reviewer A’s opinion on whether architects should take note of de Botton’s ideas? 

2) Express a similar view to reviewer B regarding the extent to which architects share de Botton’s concerns? 

3) Holds that there is a correlation between beauty and perceptions. 

Which text is saying the following?

4) The challenge of architecture is that people see its beauty. 

5) There is an array of appreciations on how to perceive the architecture. 

6) A recommendation on literature is given to masters.

7) The aim is to see beyond the merely substance. 

Part 4

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

Natural Defences

The immune system is equal in complexity to the combined intricacies of the brain and nervous system. The success of the immune system in defending the body relies on a dynamic regulatory communications network consisting of millions and millions of cells. Organized into sets and subsets, these cells pass information back and forth like clouds of bees swarming around a hive. The result is a sensitive system of checks and balances that produces an immune response that is prompt, appropriate, effective, and self-limiting.

At the heart of the immune system is the ability to distinguish between self and non-self. When immune defenders encounter cells or organisms carrying foreign or non-self molecules, the immune troops move quickly to eliminate the intruders. Virtually every body cell carries distinctive molecules that identify it as self. The body’s immune defenses do not normally attack tissues that carry a self-marker. Rather, immune cells and other body cells coexist peaceably in a state known as self-tolerance. When a normally functioning immune system attacks a non-self molecule, the system has the ability to remember the specifics of the foreign body. Upon subsequent encounters with the same species of molecules, the immune system reacts accordingly. With the possible exception of antibodies passed during lactation, this so-called immune system memory is not inherited. Despite the occurrence of a virus in your family, your immune system must learn from experience with the many millions of distinctive non-self molecules in the sea of microbes in which we live. Learning entails producing the appropriate molecules and cells to match up with and counteract each non-self invader.

Any substance capable of triggering an immune response is called an antigen. Antigens are not to be confused with allergens, which are most often harmless substances (such as ragweed pollen or cat hair) that provoke the immune system to set off the inappropriate and harmful response known as allergy. An antigen can be a virus, a bacterium, a fungus, a parasite, or even a portion or product of one of these organisms. Tissues or cells from another individual (except an identical twin, whose cells carry identical self-markers) also act as antigens; because the immune system recognizes transplanted tissues as foreign, it rejects them. The body will even reject nourishing proteins unless they are first broken down by the digestive system into their primary, non-antigenic building blocks. An antigen announces its foreignness by means of intricate and characteristic shapes called epitopes, which protrude from its surface. Most antigens, even the simplest microbes, carry several different kinds of epitopes on their surface; some may even carry several hundred. Some epitopes will be more effective than others at stimulating an immune response. Only in abnormal situations does the immune system wrongly identify self as non-self and execute a misdirected immune attack. The result can be a so-called autoimmune disease such as rheumatoid arthritis or systemic lupus erythematosis. The painful side effects of these diseases are caused by a person’s immune system actually attacking itself.

1) What is the analogy used to describe the communications network among the cells in the immune system?

2) The immune cells and other cells in the body coexist peaceably in a state known as…

3) What is the specific term for the substance capable of triggering an inappropriate or harmful immune response to a harmless substance such as ragweed pollen? 

4) How do the cells in the immune system recognize an antigen as foreign or non-self? 

5) After you have had the chicken pox, your immune system will be able to do all of the following: 

6) The basic function of the immune system is to…

7) Why would tissue transplanted from father to daughter have a greater risk of being detected as foreign than a tissue transplanted between identical twins?

8) What is the meaning of the underlined word intricacies as it is used in the first sentence of the passage?

9) When stimulating an immune response how different kinds of epitopes act?

10) When immune system memory is not inherited?