• Author / Uploaded
• Andres Cardozo

Citation preview

Name: _____________________________________________ Pre-First ¦ Mid-term examination ¦ July SECTION: LISTENING

Listen to an interview with Jane Turner about part of her job and complete the sentences. 1 Jane Turner’s main job is as a ___________. 2 She is also involved in creating a magazine for the school’s ___________. 3 The magazine includes information about new ___________ the school is carrying out. 4 The magazine comes out ___________ a year. 5 The next issue goes out on ___________. 6 ___________ extra people are being brought in to help with the next issue. 7 Old students often send in information about their ___________.

Listen to six people answering the question “Are you a risk taker?” Choose from the list (A-F) what each speaker says or thinks. Use the letters only once. (File 4)

A. He/she says that some activities are enjoyable because they are a bit risky B. He/she thinks that his /her attitude to risk is different from what it was before C. He/she thinks that taking risks means losing control D. He/she had to pay some money because of his / her risky behaviour E. He/she worries about his / her personal safety F. He/she does something which most people think of as very risky, but which he / she says is not

Speaker 1 [

]

Speaker 2 [

]

Speaker 3 [

]

Speaker 4 [

]

Speaker 5 [

]

Speaker 6 [

]

Name: _____________________________________________ Pre-First ¦ Mid-term examination ¦ July SECTION: READING Read the article and answer questions 1–7 by choosing from the people A–C. The people may be chosen more than once. Which person expects visitors to be punctual? (1) _____ is taking his/her guests dancing? (2) _____ takes visitors to famous people’s homes? (3) _____ is helping someone discover an ancestor? (4) _____ shows visitors a display of unusual objects? (5) _____ takes visitors to see where famous people are buried? (6) _____ believes some older people may be helpful? (7) _____ Are you tired of taking guided tours? Do you want a travel experience that’s a bit different? One way to do this is to use the worldwide network of ‘greeter’ organisations. Greeters are local people who volunteer to show visitors around their town or area. In most places it is a completely free service provided by enthusiastic and friendly people. The first thing to do is go online and find out if there is a greeter network or something similar in the place you want to visit. If there is, you say what you want to see and what your interests are. Then the organisation matches you with a suitable volunteer. It is a non-commercial way of meeting local people and finding out what a place is really like. We are going to follow three greeters on different continents to see how the network works. A Haroula Jackson Haroula Jackson is a Greek Australian who shows Greek visitors around her area of Melbourne. Her guest today is Nick Tavrides. He’s British, but his family originally came from Crete. Haroula hopes to use her local knowledge to help Nick. He wants to find someone who knew his great-uncle who settled in Melbourne 70 years ago. Today they’re in Lonsdale Street, the heart of the city’s Greek area. Nick hopes he may bump into a distant cousin or uncle. Perhaps this is optimistic, but Haroula thinks they might learn something from one of the old men playing tavli, a traditional board game. B Pablo Hernandez In Buenos Aires a retired university teacher, Pablo Hernandez, enjoys showing visitors around his area: the Recoleta neighbourhood. Today he is looking after art students Sylvie and her boyfriend Stéphane from France. They want to see some of the buildings that were designed by French architects a century ago. Paolo always takes his guests to the extraordinary El Palacio de las Aguas Corrientes and its strange collection of toilets! Both Sylvie and Stéphane are keen on tango, so this evening they are meeting up with another volunteer. This is another tango fan, who promises to take them dancing. The students would rather go to a dance hall where the local people go than to one of the usual tourist places. C Anthea Cohen Closer to home in London, local historian Anthea Cohen is waiting outside Hampstead underground station. She is about to set off on a tour of Hampstead and Highgate, two north London villages. The tour leaves at ten o’clock exactly and she never waits for late arrivals to turn up. The Mascaro family from Palma arrive just in time. She begins with the main sights, including the house where the poet Keats lived. Carmen Mascaro works as a psychiatrist, so they are going on a special visit to Sigmund Freud’s home and its fascinating museum. Anthea finishes the tour with a visit to Highgate Cemetery. This is the resting place of many famous people including Karl Marx. At four o’clock Anthea says goodbye to her tired but happy visitors outside Highgate underground station. She texts her husband Lewis to come and pick her up.

Name: _____________________________________________ Pre-First ¦ Mid-term examination ¦ July Five sentences have been removed from the following text. Read the article and choose which sentence (A-F) fits best in each gap. There is one extra sentence you need not use.

The Buy Nothing movement Social media, magazines and shop windows bombard people daily with things to buy, and British consumers are buying more clothes and shoes than ever before. Online shopping means it is easy for customers to buy without thinking, while major brands offer such cheap clothes that they can be treated like disposable items – worn two or three times and then thrown away. In Britain, the average person spends more than £1,000 on new clothes a year, which is around four per cent of their income. (1)__________________. First, a lot of that consumer spending is via credit cards. British people currently owe approximately £670 per adult to credit card companies. That’s 66 per cent of the average wardrobe budget. (2)__________________. Britain throws away 300,000 tons of clothing a year, most of which goes into landfill sites. People might not realise they are part of the disposable clothing problem because they donate their unwanted clothes to charities. But charity shops can’t sell all those unwanted clothes. ‘Fast fashion’ goes out of fashion as quickly as it came in and is often too poor quality to recycle; people don’t want to buy it second-hand. Huge quantities end up being thrown away, and a lot of clothes that charities can’t sell are sent abroad, causing even more economic and environmental problems. (3)__________________. The idea originated in Canada in the early 1990s and then moved to the US, where it became a rejection of the overspending and overconsumption of Black Friday and Cyber Monday during Thanksgiving weekend. On Buy Nothing Day people organise various types of protests and cut up their credit cards. Throughout the year, Buy Nothing groups organise the exchange and repair of items they already own. The trend has now reached influencers on social media who usually share posts of clothing and make-up that they recommend for people to buy. (4)__________________. Two friends in Canada spent a year working towards buying only food. For the first three months they learned how to live without buying electrical goods, clothes or things for the house. For the next stage, they gave up services, for example haircuts, eating out at restaurants or buying petrol for their cars. In one year, they’d saved $55,000. The changes they made meant two fewer cars on the roads, a reduction in plastic and paper packaging and a positive ecological impact from all the energy saved. (5)__________________. But even if you can’t manage a full year without going shopping, you can participate in the anticonsumerist movement by refusing to buy things you don’t need. Buy Nothing groups send a clear message to companies that people are no longer willing to accept the environmental and human cost of overconsumption. A. However, a different trend is springing up in opposition to consumerism – the ‘buy nothing’ trend. B. If everyone followed a similar plan, the effect on the environment would be impressive. C. Second, not only are people spending money they don’t have, they’re using it to buy things they don’t need. D. Some YouTube stars now encourage their viewers not to buy anything at all for periods as long as a year. E. But it is old people who find it very difficult to jump on the bandwagon and follow the herd. F. That might not sound like much, but that figure hides two far more worrying trends for society and for the environment.