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Name: ______________________________________

Gold Advanced

Class: ______________________________

Exit test

Section 1: Vocabulary 1

Read the text and decide which answer (A, B, C or D) best fits each gap.

I rarely act on (1) ___ , so when my grandmother,

felt somewhat in awe of her, as she seems

who has the most (2) ___ demeanour of anyone

absolutely fearless (10) ___ I seem to be terrified

her age, suggested we go on a walking tour of

(11) ___ everything. Gran and my parents have

Australia, I nearly passed out. ‘I’ve had a (3) ___ ,’

never (12) ___ any demands on me and have

she told me last night. ‘Let’s have an adventure!’

allowed me to find my own way. They have

Gran is always telling me to make my (4) ___ on

always been there to guide me but deep down I

the world, as she wants me to (5) ___ my potential.

think they were all hoping that I would (13) ___

Sadly, I don’t have her optimism and think that her

Gran’s example. When she came up with her

belief is largely (6) ___ thinking on her part. She

suggestion, I found lots of excuses not to go but

wants me to be as courageous as she was in her

Gran (14) ___ a command at me: ‘Go pack your

(7) ___ , when she travelled through Africa alone.

bag – one only. Nothing that (15) ___ up too much

I was brought up with her amazing stories about

space!’ You do not want to argue with my gran

when she was (8) ___ with life-or-death choices,

when she’s like this. She looked up from the

all of which have been (9) ___ to my memory like

computer. ‘I can get tickets for tomorrow morning,

a digital library. But truth be told, I have always

so go pack,’ she said, printing off our tickets.

1 A intuition

B instinct

C impulse

D impression

2 A juvenile

B infant

C childish

D youthful

3 A brainwave

B brainteaser

C brainstorm

D brainchild

4 A sign

B mark

C success

D hit

5 A gain

B grow

C fulfil

D earn

6 A aspiring

B ambitious

C hopeful

D wishful

7 A youth

B infancy

C adolescence D childhood

8 A encountered

B tackled

C faced

D joined

9 A dedicated

B committed

C promised

D compelled

10 A despite

B whereas

C otherwise

D however

11 A from

B by

C of

D for

12 A had

B made

C forced

D kept

13 A practise

B make

C pursue

D follow

14 A barked

B coughed

C groaned

D muttered

15 A makes

B puts

C uses

D take / 15

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Read the text. Use the word given in capitals at the end of some of the lines to form a word that fits in the gap in the same line. Biodiversity refers to the (1) ____________ of ecosystems and living organisms and constitutes the (2) ____________ of life on Earth. It is vital to human (3) ____________ on the planet. Without it, we would not have the basic components of life: oxygen, food, freshwater, fertile soils, medicines, a stable climate and so on. (4) ____________ , it is the one natural feature on Earth which has been most affected by human (5) ____________ . The main reason for this is because it is impossible to put a price tag on biodiversity, so its (6) ____________ importance has been largely ignored by financial markets, whose (7) ____________ to this valuable resource has added to the (8) ____________ lack of strategic protection and conservation. According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, there are between five and thirty million species on our planet but the (9) ____________ of only around two million of those has been formally identified. Every day the (10) ____________ of species is around 1,000 times more than it would have been without human (11) ____________ , due to the (12) ____________ of habitats and land being turned over to agriculture, to name but two causes. Climate change, over-exploitation, habitat loss and fragmentation, pollution and the spread of (13) ____________ alien species are contributing to the biggest disaster and loss of life since dinosaurs disappeared from the planet around sixty-five million years ago.

VARY FOUND SURVIVE FORTUNE ACT ECONOMY DIFFER SHAME EXIST EXTINCT INTERFERE DESTROY INVADE

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Section 2: Grammar 3

Complete the second sentence so that it has a similar meaning to the first sentence, using the word given. Do not change the word given. You must use between three and six words, including the word given.

1

I am always upset when I hear about children starving in Africa. IT I _________________________________ hear about children starving in Africa.

2

We have never told the staff that there might be redundancies. NO At _________________________________ the staff that there might be redundancies.

3

They worked late and they didn’t get paid for it. DID Not _________________________________ they also didn’t get paid for it.

4

She knows a lot about British history. GOOD She _________________________________ British history.

5

My parents wouldn’t let me train as an airline pilot. STOPPED My parents _________________________________ as an airline pilot.

6

There’s no chance whatsoever of getting tickets for the concert. QUITE It’s _________________________________ tickets for the concert.

7

We don’t think he’ll be here before 2 o’clock this afternoon. EXPECTED He _________________________________ before 2 o’clock this afternoon.

8

The company was in danger of going bankrupt last year. COULD The company _________________________________ last year.

9

She hasn’t visited her parents for ages. HIGH It’s _________________________________ her parents.

10

I only know the truth because she told me. NOT If she hadn’t told me, I _________________________________ the truth.

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I’ll give you a set of keys because I might not be here when you return. CASE I’ll give you a set of keys _________________________________ when you return.

12

My boss thought I had stolen some money from the office. ACCUSED My boss _________________________________ some money from the office.

13

He’s a great speaker because of his enthusiasm for the subject. WHAT His enthusiasm for the subject _________________________________ a great speaker. / 13

4

Complete the text. Use only one word for each gap. In 1948, Garry Davis, a former American actor and B-17 bomber pilot went to the US Embassy in Paris and declared that he (1) ____________ longer wished to be an American citizen but a citizen of the world. (2) ____________ been through the Second World War, he could not (3) ____________ the thought of a third world war, which threatened as the Cold War (4) ____________ East and West started to ignite. He went to the UN General Assembly and demanded (5) ____________ should become a single world government, for the whole of the planet. His ideas gained many supporters, (6) ____________ Albert Schweitzer and Albert Camus. He founded the World Government of World Citizens, along with the World Service Authority (WSA) in 1953 in Ellsworth, Maine, USA. Today anyone can apply (7) ____________ a World Passport, provided they fill in the application form and send in their payment. The cheapest passport is for three years and costs $45; the most expensive is a World Donor Passport, which lasts for fifteen years and is only issued on a donation of at (8) ____________ $4,000 to the World Refugee Fund, which helps WSA provide documents for needy refugees. A World Passport does not supersede a person’s national passport, which, by nature, is exclusive, in (9) ____________ to a World Passport, which is wholly inclusive. It represents the ideal that we are all human beings who belong to one big family (10) ____________ of belonging to sovereign states which are constantly vying for predominance. (11) ____________ Garry Davis’ own words, ‘The world passport opens the door. Anyone can get it. Everyone is a human being, everyone has a right to travel.’ However, not every nation accepts the passport, (12) ____________ there is evidence that more than 160 nations have stamped World Passports at some time or another, (13) ____________ a case-by-case basis. Garry Davis died aged 92 in 2013, without seeing his dream of a peaceful world come true. (14) ____________ his death, his dreams are not forgotten and the organisation he created still carries his message to the world. / 14

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Section 3: Listening 5

► 06 You will hear five different speakers talking about dealing with forgetfulness. While you listen, you must complete both tasks.

Task 1 For questions 1–5, choose from the list (A–H) what the result of each speaker’s forgetfulness is. A

being unable to do something

Speaker 1

(1) _____

B

failing to deal with a problem

Speaker 2

(2) _____

C

feeling very worried

Speaker 3

(3) _____

D

appearing to be stupid

Speaker 4

(4) _____

E

being unable to get a message across

Speaker 5

(5) _____

F

disappointing someone

G

ending a relationship

H

infuriating someone

Task 2 For questions 6-10, choose from the list (A-H) the way each speaker chose to deal with the problem. A

taking photos of what they wish to recall

Speaker 1

(6) _____

B

recalling something connected to what they wish to remember

Speaker 2

(7) _____

C

recollecting the original learning experience

Speaker 3

(8) _____

D

acquiring a technological aid

Speaker 4

(9) _____

E

writing lists on small pieces of paper

Speaker

(10) _____

F

having short written reminders

G

creating an image of what’s around them

H

using a series of different techniques / 10

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Section 4: Reading 6

Read the article below and choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text.

1

What do we learn about Barbara Arrowsmith-Young in the first paragraph?

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A She has learned over the years how to help her own child. B When she was a child, it was thought that she would grow out of her problems. C Her particular problem went undiagnosed until she was a young woman. D She believes that children need to be told if they are likely to find school difficult. 2

A rats have much larger brains than people think. B neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to keep on growing. C Barbara would not be able to do anything to improve her brain. D the brain requires regular and frequent stimulation to function normally. 7

Her teachers at school A B C D

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thought she was just being lazy. set exams that were too difficult. helped her with special lessons. said that she would be unable to pass university entrance exams.

5

What do we learn about the Russian soldier? A His language skills were those of a young child. B He knew that his injury had caused damage to his sight. C He believed that brain damage might be the cause of his problem. D His interpretation of his problem was slightly different from Barbara’s.

What do we learn about the traditional attitude towards people with learning disabilities? A It was impossible to improve the performance of the brain. B People were taught how to live with the problem. C Brain exercises have always been a part of dealing with learning disabilities. D They would never be able to function in a modern society.

When Barbara was twenty-six years old, she A was studying neuropsychology in Russia. B discovered that she was not the only person in the world with her problem. C started to write a book about her disabilities. D wrote to a Russian soldier who had the same problems as she did.

Barbara’s attempt at improving her brain A ended up with her giving up from extreme tiredness. B made her feel as if her personality was changing. C included spending a long time focusing on speed tests. D failed to help her make connections she had always found difficult.

How did her problem manifest itself? A She could understand the meaning of difficult words. B She found it hard to remember anything. C She had amazing eyesight. D She could seem quite stupid at times.

3

According to Mark Rosenzweig,

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Barbara Arrowsmith-Young A has taught thousands of children to pass exams. B says that every child is able to improve their brains as she did. C says if learning disabilities are not diagnosed quickly enough, people cannot find work. D says that children’s problems are often not correctly recognised.

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How to rebuild your own brain It’s not the kind of thing you would ever forget. When Barbara Arrowsmith-Young started school in Canada in the early 1950s, her teacher told her mother – in her presence – that she would never be able to learn. Having helped over 4,000 children overcome exactly the same diagnosis, she can laugh at it. But she didn’t at the time. Today ArrowsmithYoung holds a master’s degree in psychology and has published a groundbreaking book called The Woman Who Changed Her Brain. But until she was in her mid-twenties, she was desperate, tormented and often depressed. She didn’t know what was wrong. On the one hand, she was brilliant with near-total auditory and visual memory. ‘I could memorise whole books.’ On the other hand, she was a dolt. ‘I didn’t understand anything,’ she says. ‘Meaning just never crystallised. Everything was fragmented, disconnected.’ In exams, she sometimes got 100 percent but whenever the task involved reasoning and interpretation she would fail dismally. ‘The teachers didn’t understand,’ she says. ‘They thought I wasn’t trying and I was often punished.’ To help her, her mother devised a series of flash cards with numbers and letters and, after much hard work, she achieved literacy and numeracy of a sort, even getting into university, where she disguised her learning disabilities by working twenty hours a day: ‘I used to hide when the security guards came to close the library at night, then come back out and carry on.’ The breakthrough came when she was twenty-six. A fellow student gave her a book by a Russian neuropsychologist, Aleksandr Luria. The book contained his research on the writings of a highly intelligent Russian soldier, Lyova Zazetsky, who had been shot in the brain during a battle, and recorded in great detail his subsequent disabilities. For the first time, Arrowsmith-Young says, ‘I recognised somebody describing exactly what I experienced. His expressions were the same: living life in a fog. His difficulties were the same: he couldn’t tell the time from a clock, he couldn’t tell the difference between the sentences The boy chases the dog and The dog chases the boy. I began to see that maybe an area of my brain wasn’t working.’ The bullet had lodged in a part of the brain where information from sight, sound, language and touch is synthesised, analysed and made sense of. Arrowsmith-Young began to realise that, in all GOLD ADVANCED

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probability, this was the region of her own brain that had been malfunctioning since she was born. Then she read about the work of Mark Rosenzweig, an American researcher who found that laboratory rats given a rich and stimulating environment developed larger brains. Rosenzweig concluded that the brain continues developing rather than being fixed at birth: a concept known as ‘neuroplasticity’. Arrowsmith-Young decided that if rats could grow bigger and better brains, so could she. She started devising exercises for herself to work the parts of her brain that weren’t functioning. She drew 100 two-handed clockfaces on cards and wrote the time each told on the back. Then she started trying to tell the time from each. She did this eight to ten hours a day, gradually becoming faster and more accurate. ‘I was experiencing mental exhaustion like I had never known,’ she says, ‘so I figured something was happening. After three or four months of this, it really felt like something had fundamentally changed in my brain. I watched an edition of a news programme and I got it. I read pages from ten books, and understood every single one. It was like stepping from darkness into light.’ She developed more exercises, for different parts of her brain, and found they worked, too. Now almost 30, she was finally beginning to function normally. It was revolutionary work, and not just for her. ‘At that time,’ she says, ‘all the work around learning disabilities involved compensating for what learners couldn’t do. It all started from the premise that they were unchangeable.’ Faced with little receptivity for her ideas, Arrowsmith-Young decided to found her own school in Toronto in 1980; she now has thirty-five such schools. Thousands of children dismissed as impossible to teach, have attended Arrowsmith schools and gone on to academic and professional success. ‘So much human suffering is caused by cognitive mismatches with the demands of the task,’ says Arrowsmith-Young. ‘So many wrong diagnoses get made, so many children get written off, so many people take wrong decisions and end up in lives and careers they did not choose for themselves but were chosen for them by cognitive limitations that can be identified and strengthened. There is hope for these people.’

© 2014 Pearson Education Ltd

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Section 5: Writing 7

Choose the correct alternatives to complete the letter.

Dear Mr Jones, I am writing with (1) regard/concern/referring/reply to your letter of 6 July, in (2) that/which/ where/it you claimed that we owe you £1,090 for work carried out on the company vehicle. We (3) appreciate/like/would like/obliged to point out that there are several incorrect details in your letter. (4) Secondly/Firstly/Finally/In addition, we agreed for work to be done up to the value of £500 but stated that we should be informed if you considered that even more work would be required. (5) Although/However/Alternatively/As a result, when we came to collect the vehicle, you presented us with a bill for £1,090, which we refused to pay as it had not been agreed by a member of our staff. In fact, there is no evidence to indicate that you tried to contact us. (6) By contrast/Whereas/Furthermore/Likewise, the work you did carry out appears to have been both unnecessary and sub-standard, (7) according/given/with reference/concerning to an expert who has checked the vehicle. As agreed, we have paid you the original £500 and have no intention of paying a further £590, which was as a result of an error made by you. I very much (8) hope/advise/ensure/look forward that this will be an end to the matter.

(9) Yours sincerely/Best wishes/Yours faithfully/Truly yours, Brenda Maynard /9 8

Put the sentences (A–G) in the correct order to make a report.

A

My recommendations would therefore be to extend or refurbish the canteen and put the managing contract out to tender.

B

Another major issue appears to be the lecture theatres, which are now extremely outdated. Considering that the building housing these was built over 100 years ago, it is no surprise that they are not adequate any more.

C

To sum up, the problems can be resolved by extending the canteen and finding better caterers, and the new lecture block should be built as soon as possible on the land on the edge of the field.

D

The aim of this report is to highlight the main problems in the college, identify the areas which should be looked at more closely and make recommendations as to how this can be done.

E

The main problem seems to lie with the student recreational areas. The canteen cannot accommodate the growing number of students.

F

My next recommendation concerns the lecture theatres. Unfortunately, a new purpose-built building is needed and I would suggest that we look at using part of the field at the back of the main buildings for this.

G

In addition, the food offered on the premises is totally unsatisfactory as well as being overpriced. 1 _____

2 _____

3 _____

4 _____

5 _____

6 _____

7 _____ /7

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Section 6: Speaking 9

Talk to your teacher about yourself and your views. You should: •

say what you hope to be doing in five years’ time.

•

talk about the job you would do if you could have any job in the world.

•

describe the advantages and disadvantages of living in a world dependent on technology.

•

explain how you think technology will change over the next decade.

•

say what you think humanity has learned from history, if anything.

Your teacher will mark your presentation using the score card below. The teacher circles 1 mark if a student includes the area and 2 marks for communicating it accurately and effectively. There is a maximum of 10 marks. The student: said what they hope to be doing in five years’ time.

1

2

talked about the job they would do if they could have any job in the world.

1

2

described the advantages and disadvantages of living in a world dependent on technology.

1

2

explained how they think technology will change over the next decade.

1

2

said what they think humanity has learned from history.

1

2 / 10 TOTAL:

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