You will hear people talking in eight different situations. For questions 1-8, choose the best answer (A, В or C).

You will hear part of a radio interview with an author called Mickey Smith, who is talking about becoming excellent at sport.

For questions 1 – 6, choose the best answer (A, B or C).

You will hear people talking in eight different situations. For questions 1 – 8, choose the best answer (A, B or C).

Questions 1-7

There are seven questions in this part.

For each question there are three option, choose the correct one.

Example: How did the woman get to work?

1. By car with a neighbour
2. Walking
3. On her bike

You will hear an interview with a 15-year-old girl called Andrea, who plays ice hockey for her national Under 16-s team. 

For each question, choose the correct answer.

For each question, choose the correct answer. 

You will listen to each recording twice. 

You are going to read an article about using energy from the sun. Six sentences have been removed from the article. Choose from the sentences A–G the one which fits each gap (37–42). There is one extra sentence which you do not need to use.

Solar energy – the sun’s gift to humanity

by Andy Groves

The sun is a huge ball of atomic activity, which emits solar energy in the form of light and heat. This energy travels through space to the planets, providing us with daylight and warmth. It is an incredible free gift. Many thousands of years ago, humans were already using solar energy in a variety of ways. Early civilisations learned, for instance, how to use the sun’s heat for drying meat, fruit or fish to keep them for later eating; the sun baked clay into bricks for building; animal skins were dried for clothing.

Later, when people started living in purpose-built houses, the value of solar energy for heat was understood and eventually became incorporated into the design. In many medieval castles there was at least one room called the ‘solar’ which faced south and had as big a window as could practically be made in those days. (37)……………  

In more recent times, the term ‘solar energy’ has taken on a somewhat different significance. Modern man uses energy in many forms and ever- increasing quantities. Generally, this energy has been obtained from fossil fuels, such as coal, oil or gas, extracted from under the ground or beneath the sea. (38)……………  Burning them is also having a terrible effect on the environment of our planet.

Because we in industrialised societies have become used to such a high level of energy usage in our everyday lives, the thought of doing without is no longer considered a realistic option. (39)……………  Fortunately, the good old sun can provide one, and solar energy is becoming crucial to our future requirements.

Solar energy is renewable, non-polluting, available everywhere, is not (yet) owned by anyone or any country and is free. It can be used directly to heat air and so provide heat for buildings in a way that is similar to how greenhouses work. Alternatively, the heat can be collected by solar panels and passed on to heat water for washing or central heating. Light-sensitive devices can convert the light from the sun into electricity. (40)……………  Initially, it was mainly used for pocket calculators, but now it powers radios, pumps, lights, and even cars.

Electricity generated from solar energy can bring power to remote areas and, together with some form of storage, such as a battery, can provide lighting for individual houses or run machinery on farms. (41)……………  To cover more extensive areas, some companies and local authorities are now using large numbers of cells to collect and convert solar energy. Some installations are large enough to provide power for a whole town.

The sun sends its solar energy to Earth at a huge rate, every day of the year. Much of this is absorbed by our dense atmosphere, the oceans and the land, or reflected back into space by the polar ice caps. (42)……………  So much, in fact, that it is estimated the sun provides as much energy in one hour as the world’s population uses in a year. This is one great gift and we should make sure we use it well.

You are going to read an article about newspapers and the Internet. Six sentences have been removed from the article. Choose from the sentences A–G the one which fits each gap (37–42). There is one extra sentence which you do not need to use.

 

Do newspapers have a future?

by Stephen Glover

 

Experts have been predicting the death of newspapers for over 50 years. Television was supposed to kill them off, and it did have some small effect. The sales of some papers began to decline from the middle 1950s, when commercial television started, and a few went out of business. But other papers prospered and new ones were launched, some thriving so much that they sold several million copies a day.

So, those who thought television would finish off the press were wrong. (37)……………  Almost every daily and Sunday national newspaper in this country is selling fewer copies than it was five years ago. In some cases, the decline has been dramatic.

The Internet, of course, is not the only factor. The natural markets for some papers, those aimed at industrial workers for instance, was already shrinking in the late 20th century. (38)……………  The consequence has been a general attempt to make big savings by cutting costs wherever possible.

A disaster, then? Some people argue that the decline in readership of newspapers does not matter because many of us, and perhaps a majority of those under 30, are reading them online. (39)……………  So if one adds all the readers of newspapers on the Internet to those who prefer a newsprint version, there may be as many, if not more, people looking at the national press as there were ten or 15 years ago.

There will, they say, still be lots of publications offering a wide variety of views and articles, as well as plenty of opportunities for writers. Indeed, one of the world’s most successful media bosses recently predicted that newspapers would reach new heights in the 21st century. (40)……………

This sounds sensible, and I hope it is right, but
I find it difficult to be quite so optimistic. The problem is that no one has yet figured out a way to make much money out of the Internet. A regular reader of an online version of a newspaper is worth 10p a month to the publisher. (41)…………… Also, the hard copy that he or she reads attracts much more advertising than the Internet version.

Most newspapers obtain over half their income from copies sold. In other words, online papers are living off their newsprint parents. Newsprint is where the money is. It follows that, as increasing numbers of readers swap their daily paper for a few minutes online, the breadth and quality of what they read will gradually go down. (42)……………  When I buy a newspaper I support expensive and ambitious journalism; if I read it online I do not.

How the recycling symbol was created

Gary Anderson designed a symbol which we see everywhere nowadays.

 

I studied engineering at the University of Southern California at a time when there was a lot of emphasis in the United States on training young people to be engineers. That said, I eventually switched to architecture. I just couldn’t get a grasp on electronics and architecture seemed more concrete to me.

It was around that time that I saw a poster advertising a design competition being run by the Container Corporation of America. The idea was to create a symbol to represent recycled paper. One of my college requirements had been a graphic design course so I thought I’d give it a go. It didn’t take me long to come up with my design: only a day or two. (37)……………  But I already had arrows and angles in my mind because on my course I’d done a presentation on recycling waste water. I’d come up with a graphic that described this process very simply.

The problem with the design I’d done earlier was that it seemed flat, two-dimensional. So when I sat down to enter the competition, I thought back to a field trip in elementary school to a newspaper office where we’d been shown how paper was fed over rollers as it was printed. (38)…………… The three arrows in it look like strips of folded-over paper. I drew them in pencil, and then traced over everything in black ink. These days, with computer graphics packages, it’s rare that designs are quite so plain.

I think I found out I’d won the competition in a letter. Was I excited? Well, yes of course – but not that excited. (39)…………… So it just seemed like, of course I would win! There was a monetary prize, though for the life of me I can’t remember how much it was… about $2,000?

When I finished my studies, I decided to go into urban planning and I moved to Los Angeles. It seems funny, but I really played down the fact that I’d won this competition. I was afraid it would make me look as though I was interested in graphics, rather than urban planning. (40)…………… I remember seeing it once on a leaflet which had been produced on recycled paper, but then it disappeared.

A while after graduating, I flew to Amsterdam for a holiday. I’ll never forget: when I walked off the plane, I saw my symbol. It was on a big recycling bin. And it was bigger than a beach ball! (41)…………… I was really taken aback. That was quite a long time ago though. Since then, I’ve got more qualifications and worked for quite a few different firms, some more environmentally aware than others.

I feel much prouder of the recycling symbol now than I used to, probably because it’s so widely seen. Maybe this design has been more important to me than I’d thought. (42)……………  There’s more to me than the recycling symbol.

You are going to read an article in which a former ballet dancer talks about the physical demands of the job. Six sentences have been removed from the article. Choose from the sentences A–G the one which fits each gap (37–42). There is one extra sentence which you do not need to use.

Good preparation leads to success in ballet dancing

A former classical ballet dancer explains what ballet training actually involves.

 

What we ballet dancers do is instinctive, but instinct learnt through a decade of training. A dancer’s life is hard to understand, and easy to misinterpret. Many a poet and novelist has tried to do so, but even they have chosen to interpret all the hard work and physical discipline as obsessive. And so the idea persists that dancers spend every waking hour in pain, bodies at breaking point, their smiles a pretence.

 

As a former dancer in the Royal Ballet Company here in Britain, I would beg to question this. (37)…………… With expert teaching and daily practice, its various demands are easily within the capacity of the healthy human body. Contrary to popular belief, there is no need to break bones or tear muscles to achieve ballet positions. It is simply a question of sufficient conditioning of the muscular system.

 

Over the course of my dancing life I worked my way through at least 10,000 ballet classes. I took my first at a school of dance at the age of seven and my last 36 years later at the Royal Opera House in London. In the years between, ballet class was the first thing I did every day. It starts at an early age, this daily ritual, because it has to. (38)…………… But for a ballet dancer in particular, this lengthy period has to come before the effects of adolescence set in, while maximum flexibility can still be achieved.

 

Those first classes I took were remarkably similar to the last. In fact, taking into account the occasional new idea, ballet classes have changed little since 1820, when the details of the ballet technique were first written down, and are easily recognized in any country. Starting with the left hand on the barre, the routine unrolls over some 75 minutes. (39)…………… Even the leading dancers have to do it.

 

These classes serve two distinct purposes: they are the way we warm our bodies and the mechanism by which we improve basic technique. In class after class, we prove the old saying that ‘practice makes perfect’. (40)…………… And it is also this daily repetition which enables us to strengthen the muscles required in jumping, spinning or lifting our legs to angles impossible to the average person.

 

The human body is designed to adapt to the demands we make of it, provided we make them carefully and over time. (41)……………In the same way, all those years of classes add up to a fit-for-purpose dancing machine. This level of physical fluency doesn’t hurt; it feels good.

 

(42)……………But they should not be missed: there is a difference between hard work and hardship. Dancers have an everyday familiarity with the first. Hardship it isn’t.