READING PRACTICE TEST 3

Part 1: You are going to read an article about life in the countryside. For questions 1-6,
choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text.
How I came to envy the country mice
I have been living in London for more than 60 years, but still, when I'm driving and take some clever
back-street short cut, I catch myself thinking: how extraordinary that it is me doing this! For a
moment the town mouse I have become is being seen by the country mouse I used to be. And
although, given a new start, I would again become a town mouse, when I visit relations in the country,
I envy them.

Recently, I stood beside a freshwater lake in Norfolk, made by diverting a small river, near where
my brother lives. As he was identifying some of the birds we could see, in came seven swans. They
circled, then the haunting sound of their wing beats gave way to silence as they glided down for
splashdown.

It is not a 'picturesque' part of the coast, but it has a definite character of line and light and color.
'You do live in a lovely place,' I said to my brother, and he answered, 'Yes, I do.' There are probably
few days when he does not pause to recognize its loveliness as he works with his boats - he teaches
sailing - or goes about his many other occupations.

The lake's creator is a local landowner, continuing a tradition whereby the nature of our countryside
has been determined by those who own the land. Formerly, landowners would almost certainly have
made such changes for their own benefit, but this time it was done to help preserve the wildlife here,
e 15 which is available for any visitor to see, providing they do nothing to disturb the birds. It is
evidence of change: country life is changing fast.

One of the biggest changes I have witnessed is that second-homers, together with commuters, have
come to be accepted as a vital part of the country scene. And the men and women who service their
cars, dig their gardens, lay their carpets and do all the other things they need are vital to modern
country life. It is quite likely that the children of today's workers may be moving into the same kind
of jobs as the second-homers and the retired. Both the children of a country woman I know are at
university, and she herself, now that they have left home, is working towards a university degree.

Much depends, of course, on the part of the countryside you are living in and on personality - your
own and that of your neighbors. In my brother's Norfolk village, social life seems dizzying to a
Londoner. In addition to dropping in on neighbors, people throw and attend parties far more often
than we do. My brother's wife Mary and her friends are always going into Norwich for a concert or
to King's Lynn for an exhibition. The boring country life that people from cities talk about is a thing
of the past - or perhaps it was always mainly in their minds.

This is very unlike living in a London street for 50 years and only knowing the names of four other
residents. In these 50 years I have made only one real friend among them. I do enjoy my life, and
Mary says that she sometimes envies it (the grass on the other side of the fence ...); but whenever I
go to Norfolk, I end up feeling that the lives of country mice are more admirable than my own.

1. It is sometimes a source of surprise to the writer

A. to find herself driving through back streets. B. that she has been in the city for so long.
C. to realize how much she has got used to living in London.
D that she lives in the city when she prefers the country.
2. The atmosphere created by the writer when she describes the swans is
A. moving. B. frightening. C. deafening. D. disturbing.
3. What does ‘It’ in line 15 refer to?
A. the lake B. the fact that the lake belongs to a landowner here
C. the reason for the landowner's action
D. the fact that wildlife now needs to be preserved
4. What is suggested about outsiders who now live in the country?
A. that country people no longer reject them.
B. that they often do work like servicing cars and digging gardens.
C. that the men and women who work for them are from the city.
D. that many of them have been in the countryside for a long time
5. Social life in the country ________________
A. depends completely on where you live.
B is not as boring as people in cities think it is.
C. is not affected by your neighbors.
D. is always less exciting than life in the city.
6. What do we learn about the writer's attitude to London in the final paragraph?
A. She can't adjust to living in London.
B. She has regretted moving to London.
C. The people in her street are unusually unfriendly.
D. Life there is very different to country life.

PART 2: You are going to read an article about the evolution of hands. Six sentences have been
removed from the article. Choose from the sentences (A- G) the one which fits each gap (7-11).
There is one extra sentence which you do not need to use.

The hand is where the mind meets the world. We use our hands to build fires, to steer airplanes, to
write. The human brain, with its open-ended creativity, may be the thing that makes our species
unique. But without hands, all the grand ideas we think up would come to nothing.
The reason we can use our hands for so many things is their extraordinary anatomy. (7)
_______Some are connected to bones within the hand, while others snake their way to the arm. The
wrist is a floating group of bones and ligaments threaded with blood vessels and nerves. The nerves
send branches into each fingertip. The hand can generate fine forces or huge ones. A watchmaker
can use his hands to set springs in place under a microscope. A sportsman can use the same anatomy
to throw a ball at over 100 kilometers an hour.
In exploring how hands have evolved, researchers over the past 150 years have dug up fossils on
every continent. They've compared the anatomy of hands in living animals. They've studied the genes
that build hands. It appears that our hands began to evolve at least 380 million years ago from fins -
not the flat, ridged fins of a goldfish but the muscular, stout fins of extinct relatives of today's
lungfish. Inside these were a few chunky bones corresponding to the bones in our arms. (8) _______
digits later emerged and became separate, allowing the animals to grip underwater vegetation as they
clambered through it.
(9) _______I Some species had seven fingers. Others had eight. But by the time vertebrates were
walking around on dry land 340 million years ago, the hand had been scaled back to only five fingers.
It has retained that number of fingers ever since - for reasons scientists don't yet know.
Nevertheless, there are still many different types of hands in living species, from dolphin flippers to
eagle wings to the hanging hooks of sloths. (10)_______They can also see that despite the outward
differences, all hands start out in much the same way. There is a network of many genes that builds
a hand, and all hands are built by variations on that same network. It takes only subtle changes in
these genes to make fingers longer or to turn nails into claws.
The discovery of the molecular toolbox for hand building has given scientists a deeper understanding
of evolution. (11) _______ It may just be a little more of one protein here, a little less of another
there. In the past, scientists could recognize only the outward signs that hands had evolved from a
common ancestor. Today scientists are uncovering the inward signs as well.

A. Over time, smaller ones developed that would eventually become wrists and fingers.
B. Although a vulture's wing and a lion's paw may appear to have nothing in common, the
difference between them may come down to tiny variations.
C. They also use them for a number of different purposes.
D. No one would doubt that the five fingers at the end of an orangutan's arm are part of anything
else.
E. By studying these, scientists are beginning to understand the molecular changes that led to such
dramatic variations.
F. The thumb alone is controlled by nine separate muscles.
G. Early hands were more exotic than any hand today
PART 3: You are going to read an article about the activities organized by four schools for
Environmental Awareness Day. For questions (12 -21) choose from the schools (A-D). The
schools may be chosen more than once.
Which school

became better known after Environmental Awareness Day? 12 _______

provided online information about the environment? 13_______
asked a specialist to give a talk? 14_______
raised money to help an organization? 15_______
organized a trip to study animals by the sea? 16_______
is following changes in general weather conditions? 17_______
carried out a project about endangered animals and plants? 18_______
arranged a talk on pollution and local architecture? 19_______
decided to protect a local historical site? 20_______
is located in the center of the city? 21_______

Environmental Awareness Day

A. Plumpton High School

This school decided to arrange a variety of activities, some aimed at achieving a better understanding
of environmental problems, and others designed to be of practical help. For instance, the school
magazine brought out a special edition on the subject, full of articles and stories where pupils
expressed their feelings about the threats facing our environment. In another attempt to find out for
themselves how serious these threats really are, the pupils decided to study the problem of pollution
by making a survey, run by the science department, into air pollution in the local shopping center.
The school also held a sponsored walk and handed over nearly £1000 to the World Wide Fund for
Nature. Pupils prepared a campaign to ban cars from the city center and reduce traffic congestion.
They gained a lot of publicity for the school by cycling through the city and handing out brochures
about the benefits of cycling and walking.
B. Cresswell College
The staff and students at Cresswell College held a meeting and discussed a number of suggestions.
The most popular suggestion turned out to be the most practical one; it was decided that the local
environment should be brightened up. Teams were sent out to plant flowers and young trees on areas
of land in the neighborhood. Senior students monitored the progress of species threatened with
extinction and prepared a report on their findings. It was hoped that this would help publicize the
problem. A leading expert on wild birds was invited to come and give a talk about the dangers faced
by these creatures. He explained the importance of the food chain and asked people to support local
wildlife reserves.
Grayner Institute
This school had already been involved in some projects connected with the environment, though
naturally efforts were increased for Environmental Awareness Day. For the last two years the school
had been studying the effects of variations in climatic patterns around the world and how these can
affect wildlife. A film about those magnificent marine mammals, whales, which was shown to the
whole school as part of Environmental Awareness Day, was received with great enthusiasm by
pupils. Meredith Summers was invited to talk about how pollution can destroy buildings in the
region. Following that, pupils decided to launch a campaign for the restoration of the medieval square
in the city center and asked local authorities to support them financially.

D. Halliwell Academy
The pupils at this inner-city secondary school felt that the best way to mark Environmental
Awareness Day would be to help people in the area understand how important the environment is to
them. One suggestion that was greeted with enthusiasm was to measure the levels of noise in Stanley
Road, a busy local shopping street. The information was then placed on a website that the school
had started. In order to give them a chance to see for themselves the problems facing some local
species, the school took pupils to the coastal marshes of Easton. Many pupils reported afterwards
that they had never realized how terrible the effects of pollution could be on coastal wildlife.
PART 4: GUIDE CLOZE TEXT:
For questions 1-8, read the text below and decide which word (A, B, c or D) best fits each gap.

Vinyl attraction
Nobody ever really expected my Uncle Peter to make much money. When he left school, he didn't
have any plans for a career, and he got a job in a second-hand record shop. Peter's mother couldn't
(1) ______over it. Her other children had both (2) ______to get places at university, and she was
quite (3) ______that a young person needed a good education to get on in life. To (4) _____things
worse, this was the time when vinyl records were being phased out. It looked as though my uncle
would soon be looking for (5) ______somewhere else. Then, all of a (6) Peter's luck changed.
He announced he was going to start collecting records and set (7)______a mail order business
selling rare records. Nobody really (8) ______him seriously at first. Who would be interested in a
technology that's out of date? Vinyl records have since become collectors' items, and my uncle is
now a very rich man.
1. A. come B.. take C. get D. pass
2. A. achieved B. succeeded C. accomplished D. managed
3. A. convinced B. persuaded C. determined D. convicted
4. A. get B. make C. bring D. drive
5. A. work B job C. career D. profession
6. A. once B. moment C. sudden D. minute
7. A. up B. out C. off D. in
8. A. took B. believed C. thought D. gave

PART 5: OPEN CLOZE TEXT

For questions 0-8, read the text below and think of the word which best fits each gap. Use only one word
in each gap.

Agriculture in ancient Britain

Professor Emma Thomas is an archaeologist (0) _________ specializes in the study of Ancient
Britain and its people. The professor and her colleagues have been involved (1) _________the
analysis of skeletons to discover more about (2) _________ way Ancient Britons lived. 'Studying
bones can tell US (3) _________great deal about our ancestors says Professor Thomas. 'We know
for a fact that between 9000 and 5200 BC, people ate a seafood diet, while after that people had a
preference (4) _________ plants and animals. (5) _________ is still a mystery why people gave up
eating fish. One explanation might be the influence of migrants to Britain. 'Britons changed (6)
_________diet after people from Europe arrived,' says Professor Thomas. ‘It was a time of change.
Our ancestors stopped hunting and started growing crops. Farming methods (7) imported from
Europe and people no longer relied (8) _________ wild foods; they could control what they ate.’
This marked the beginning of agriculture in Britain.