I) Write A, B or C in the blanks, choosing from the lists below (do not write the words in the blanks!)

a)

Danny sat staring (1) ________ the checkered vinyl tablecloth, wishing hard that he (2) _______ somewhere else. (3) ______ T/trailer’s kitchen was so cramped that there (4) _______ room to move, and it got so overheated and smelly from the stove that it was (5) _______ unpleasant place to sit even in winter. (6) ______ F/few minutes before, he’d drifted (7) _______ into a waking daydream, a dream about a girl – not a real girl, but a girl like a spirit. Dark hair swirling, like weeds at (8) _______ shallow pond’s edge: maybe black, maybe green. She’d (9) _______ close, as if (10)________ him – but instead, she’d breathed into his open mouth, cool fresh wonderful air, air like a breath from Paradise. The sweetness of (11) ______ memory (12) _______ him shudder. He wanted to be alone, to savour the daydream, for it was fading fast and he wanted (13) _______ to slip back (14) _______ it.

1. A) in B) on C) at

2. A) were B) is C) had been

3. A) A B) The C) Ø

4. A) wasn’t hardly B) was hardly C) was hard

5. A) a B) an C) the

6. A) A B) The C) Ø

7. A) on B) off C) out

8. A) a B) the C) Ø

9. A) drawed B) drew C) drawn

10. A) kissing B) to kiss C) kissed

11. A) a B) the C) Ø

12. A) made B) gave C) did

13. A) desperate B) desperately C) desperatelly

14. A) in B) to C) into

 

b) [The same instructions as under a) above]

Lifting his head from the files, he listened. (1) _______ was a noise, faintly discernible, like the creeping of a myriad insects. He remembered it from his childhood nights, (2) _______ awake in the nursery of his father’s Norfolk vicarage, a sound he had never heard in the noise of cities, the first gentle sibilant whisper of the night rain. Soon it (3) _______ by a spatter of drops against the window and the (4) _______ moan of the wind in the chimney. There was a violent flurry of rain against the pane and then, as quickly as it (5) _______, the brief storm was over. He opened the window to savour the smell of the damp night air, and gazed out into a blanket of darkness, black fen earth merging with the paler sky.

As his eyes became accustomed (6) ________ the night, he (7) _______ discern the low rectangle of the village hall and, beyond it, the great medieval tower of the church. (8) _______ the moon sailed out from behind the clouds and the churchyard became visible, the obelisks and gravestones gleaming pale (9) _______ they exuded their own mysterious light. Below him, faintly luminous, (10) _______ the gravel path along (11) _______, the previous night, the morris-dancers, bells jangling, (12) _______ their way through the mist.

1. A) It B) That C) There

2. A) laying B) lying C) lay

3. A) followed B) had followed C) was followed

4. A) rising B) raising C) risen

5. A) begun B) began C) had begun

6. A) on B) to C) at

7. A) might B) could C) was able

8. A) Then B) Than C) Thus

9. A) as B) as if C) like

10. A) laid B) lay C) lied

11. A) where B) that C) which

12. A) had made B) have made C) made

 

II) Fill in the boxes to complete the words (please write clearly!):

President George W. Bush said in an interview br_______on CNN yesterday that the war in I_______ was w_______ its costs because Saddam Hussein was ‘a madman’ who posed a clear th_______ and who h_______the capacity, at a minimum, to bu_______ banned weapons.  ‘Saddam Hussein was dangerous, and I was not just going to leave him in po_______ and trust a madman,’ he said. ‘He had the ab_______ to make weapons.’  The president thus repeated a belief that the instability, untrustwo_______ and past aggressiveness of the Ir_______ leader were cause enough for war.

Bush also said that the job of George Tenet, the d_______of central intelligence, was ‘absolutely not’ in jeo_______ despite a swelling of controversy o_______ the failure to f_______ the banned weapons that intelligence agencies believed were in the country.  Saddam wanted s_______ a weapon, Tenet said last week, but was probably years from b_______ able to develop one. Intelligence agencies ‘may have overe_______ the progress’ he was m_______, the CIA chief said.  Bush said that the United States and its al_______ had done a ‘very good job’ of dismantling Al Qa_______. He would not speculate on when Osama bin Laden would be cap_______

 

III) Read the following text carefully. There will be some comprehension questions for you to answer:

1 None of us can ever retrieve that innocence before all theory when art
2
knew no need to justify itself, when one did not ask of a work of art
3 what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did. From
4
now to the end of consciousness,
we are stuck with the task of
5 defending art. We can only quarrel with one or another means of
6 defense. Indeed, we have an obligation to overthrow any means of
7
defending and justifying art which becomes particularly insensitive to
8
contemporary needs and practice.
9 This is the case, today, with the very idea of content itself. Whatever it
10
may have been in the past, the idea of content is today mainly a
11
hindrance, a nuisance, a subtle or not so subtle philistinism.
12 Though the actual developments in many arts may seem to be leading
13
us away from the idea that a work of art is primarily its content, the
14
idea still exerts an extraordinary hegemony. I want to suggest that this
15
is because the idea is now perpetuated in the guise of a certain way of
16
encountering works of art thoroughly ingrained among most people
17
who take any of the arts seriously. What the overemphasis on the idea
18
of content entails is the perennial, never consummated project of
19
interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching works of
20
art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy that there really is
21
such a thing as the content of a work.

From: Susan Sontag: Against Interpretations and Other Essays

 

Having read the text, put a circle around the correct answer A, B or C (only one is correct):

1. The word retrieve in line 1 means:

A) bring back
B) forget
C) deny

2. The word itself in line 2 refers to:

A) innocence
B) theory
C) art

3. The expression we are stuck with the task of defending art in lines 4/5 means:

A) we are happy with the task of defending art
B) we can’t avoid the task of defending art
C) we are fed up with the task of defending art

4. In line 6 to overthrow means:

A) to support
B) to reject
C) to bring back

5. The word hindrance in line 11 means:

A) an obstacle
B) an advantage
C) novelty

6. The word philistinism in line 11 means:

A) lack of understanding art
B) love of art
C) a contemporary school of art

7. The collocation exerts hegemony in line 14 means:

A) is irrelevant
B) is too simplistic
C) is dominant

8. The word perpetuated in line 15 means:

A) rejected
B) hidden
C) continued

9. The word guise in line 15 means:

A) mask
B) development
C) discovery

10. The collocation thoroughly ingrained in line 16 means:

A) highly unpopular
B) deep-rooted
C) completely rejected

11. The word entails in line 18 means:

A) involves
B) eliminates
C) excludes

12. The word perennial in line 18 means:

A) permanent
B) occasional
C) praiseworthy

13. The word conversely in line 19 means:

A) by the way
B) actually
C) on the other hand

14. The word fancy in line 20 means:

A) impossibility
B) sympathy
C) notion

 

IV) Put a circle round the correct choice a), b) or c):

1. The plots of James Joyce's best known novels are situated in

  1. Scotland
  2. England
  3. Ireland

2. The term 'Puritan' designates

  1. someone using the standard forms of the English language
  2. a member of a religious group
  3. a person working for the Environmental Protection Agency

3. One of the most famous poetic works of the English Romanticism Childe Harold's Pilgrimage was written by

  1. George Gordon Lord Byron
  2. Sir Walter Scott
  3. William Butler Yeats

4. Which of the main characters of William Shakespeare' s Othello has frequently been described as machiavellian

  1. Cassio
  2. Iago
  3. Desdemona

5. The film (The) Hours is based on the biography of the famous English woman writer

  1. Jane Austen
  2. Virginia Woolf
  3. George Eliot

6. The period in the history of English literature distinguished by the rise of the novel is

  1. the Romantic period
  2. the Enlightement
  3. the Victorian period

7. The Nobel Prize for literature for 1995 was awarded to the British writer

  1. Samuel Beckett
  2. Seamus Heaney
  3. William Golding

8. Francis Ford Coppola's celebrated film Apocalypse Now was inspired by Joseph Conrad's famous novel

  1. Heart of Darkness
  2. Lord Jim
  3. Nostromo

9. The screenplay for Wayne Wang's recent film Smoke was written by the contemporary American novelist:

  1. Don DeLillo
  2. Paul Auster
  3. Jonathan Franzen

10. One of the most popular American novelists Ernest Hemingway is the author of

  1. The Old Man and the Sea
  2. Moby Dick
  3. Tender Is the Night