Comprehension and Listening

Diagnostic Test

Student Name:

Date:
TEACHER COPY

Instructions

The purpose of this test is to gauge your level of English reading and listening
comprehension. Complete the test to the best of your ability.

Each section has a mixture of multiple choice, short answer and short essay questions. For
the multiple choice questions, choose the best answer. For the short answer questions,
please write your answer in the space below the question. For the short essay question
please respond to the question by writing a short paragraph (5-10 sentences).

In the reading section, please circle the words that you do not know.

Pledge:

I have neither given nor received any unauthorized aid on this exam.

Student signature:

Listening Section

There are two parts to the listening section. Two passages will be read to you. Each passage
will be read three times. After each passage are several short answer and one short essay
question.

You have 30 minutes to complete this section.

Listening #1

1. How many participants did the survey

Only about 5% of American adults do some type of vigorous physical activity on any given day, according to the
results of a new study.
Researchers analyzed 2003-2008 data from nearly 80,000 participants, aged 20 and older, in the American Time
Use Survey, a national telephone-based poll that asked people what they did in the preceding 24 hours.
Most respondents reported sedentary activities such as eating and drinking (95.6%) and watching television/movies
(80.1%), or light activities such as washing, dressing and grooming (78.9%), and driving a car, truck or motorcycle
(71.4%).
The most frequently reported moderate activities were food and drink preparation (25.7%) and lawn, garden and
houseplant care (10.6%), lead investigator Catrine Tudor-Locke, director of the Walking Behavior Laboratory at
Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, and colleagues found.
Only 5% of respondents reported vigorous physical activities, including using cardiovascular exercise equipment
(2.2%) and running (1.1%).
The survey findings are published online and in the October print issue of the American Journal of Preventive
Medicine.
"On any given day, most U.S. adults reported performing predominantly sedentary and light activities. The greatest
prevalence for reported moderate activities was food and drink preparation for both men (12.8%) and women
(37.6%)," the authors wrote in the report.

Listening #2

1. How long has Tony Hawk been a professional skateboarder?

a. 24 years
b. 34 years
c. 44 years
d. 38 years

2. Tony says, “Even during those dark years, I never stopped riding my skateboard.”
What does the word dark mean in this context?
a. Black
b. Easy
c. Light
d. Difficult

3. What did Tony’s son write when his teacher asked him what his dad does for work?
a. “My Dad Sells Money”
b. “I’ve never seen my dad do work.”
c. “My Dad rides skateboards.”
d. “My dad figures stuff out.”

4. Tony says his parents never questioned the “practicality” of skateboarding. What
does the word practicality mean in this context?
a. practice
b. fun
c. usefulness
d. uselessnes

5. Using a short paragraph, explain your opinion of Tony’s statement: “I believe that
people should take pride in what they do, even if it is scorned or misunderstood by
the public at large”

I believe that people should take pride in what they do, even if it is scorned or misunderstood by the public at large.
I have been a professional skateboarder for 24 years. For much of that time, the activity that paid my rent and gave
me my greatest joy was tagged with many labels, most of which were ugly. It was a kids’ fad, a waste of time, a
dangerous pursuit, a crime.
When I was about 17, three years after I turned pro, my high school “careers” teacher scolded me in front of the
entire class about jumping ahead in my workbook. He told me that I would never make it in the workplace if I didn’t
follow directions explicitly. He said I’d never make a living as a skateboarder, so it seemed to him that my future
was bleak.
Even during those dark years, I never stopped riding my skateboard and never stopped progressing as a skater.
There have been many, many times when I’ve been frustrated because I can’t land a maneuver. I’ve come to realize
that the only way to master something is to keep it at — despite the bloody knees, despite the twisted ankles, despite
the mocking crowds.
Skateboarding has gained mainstream recognition in recent years, but it still has negative stereotypes. The pro
skaters I know are responsible members of society. Many of them are fathers, homeowners, world travelers and
successful entrepreneurs. Their hairdos and tattoos are simply part of our culture, even when they raise eyebrows
during PTA meetings.
So here I am, 38 years old, a husband and father of three, with a lengthy list of responsibilities and obligations. And
although I have many job titles — CEO, Executive Producer, Senior Consultant, Foundation Chairman, Bad Actor
— the one I am most proud of is “Professional Skateboarder.” It’s the one I write on surveys and customs forms,
even though I often end up in a secondary security checkpoint.
My youngest son’s pre-school class was recently asked what their dads do for work. The responses were things like,
“My dad sells money” and “My dad figures stuff out.” My son said, “I’ve never seen my dad do work.”
It’s true. Skateboarding doesn’t seem like real work, but I’m proud of what I do. My parents never once questioned
the practicality behind my passion, even when I had to scrape together gas money and regarded dinner at Taco Bell
as a big night out.
I hope to pass on the same lesson to my children someday. Find the thing you love. My oldest son is an avid skater
and he’s really gifted for a 13-year-old, but there’s a lot of pressure on him. He used to skate for endorsements, but
now he brushes all that stuff aside. He just skates for fun and that’s good enough for me.
You might not make it to the top, but if you are doing what you love, there is much more happiness there than being
rich or famous.

Reading Section

There are three readings in the reading section. After each reading are five short answer
questions and one short essay question.

Please circle words that you do not know.

You have two hours to finish the reading section of the exam.

Reading #1

An excerpt from the essay “Superman and Me” by Sherman Alexie:

I learned to read with a Superman comic book. Simple enough, I suppose. I cannot recall which
particular Superman comic book I read, nor can I remember which villain he fought in that
issue. I cannot remember the plot, nor the means by which I obtained the comic book. What I
can remember is this: I was 3 years old, a Spokane Indian boy living with his family on the
Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington state. We were poor by most standards, but
one of my parents usually managed to find some minimum-wage job or another, which made
us middle-class by reservation standards. I had a brother and three sisters. We lived on a
combination of irregular paychecks, hope, fear and government surplus food.

My father, who is one of the few Indians who went to Catholic school on purpose, was an avid
reader of westerns, spy thrillers, murder mysteries, gangster epics, basketball player
biographies and anything else he could find. He bought his books by the pound at Dutch's Pawn
Shop, Goodwill, Salvation Army and Value Village. When he had extra money, he bought new
novels at supermarkets, convenience stores and hospital gift shops. Our house was filled with
books. They were stacked in crazy piles in the bathroom, bedrooms and living room. In a fit of
unemployment-inspired creative energy, my father built a set of bookshelves and soon filled
them with a random assortment of books about the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, the
Vietnam War and the entire 23-book series of the Apache westerns. My father loved books, and
since I loved my father with an aching devotion, I decided to love books as well.

1. How old was Sherman when he began to read?

2. Where did Sherman grow up?

3. How and where did Sherman’s dad buy his books?

4. What genres of books did Sherman’s dad read?

5. Why does Sherman say he decided to love books?

6. Do you love books? In a short paragraph (5-10 sentences), explain if you like to
read and why.

Reading #2

This is an excerpt from USAToday, an American newspaper, discussing women

congressional candidates and the November elections in the United States.
Elections are likely to trim number of women in Congress

GLENWOOD, Ark. — Blanche Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1992, a time when women
gained so much ground in the House and Senate that it was dubbed the "Year of the Woman."
Now, the Arkansas senator, who faces Republican John Boozman in November, is fighting for
her political life in what could wind up being called the Year of the Setback.

The prospects for female congressional candidates have been hurt by a combination of a tough
political landscape for Democrats — women in Congress are disproportionately Democratic—
and the nation's economic troubles. Hard times historically have made voters more risk-averse
and less willing to consider voting for female candidates.

Bottom line: Independent analysts predict that the number of women in Congress — currently
56 Democrats and 17 Republicans in the House, and 13 Democrats and four Republicans in the
Senate — will decline for the first time in three decades. The drop would come two years after
a string of breakthroughs, when Hillary Rodham Clinton was the first woman to vie seriously for
the Democratic presidential nod, Sarah Palin the first woman nominated for national office by
the GOP and Democrat Nancy Pelosi the first woman elected speaker of the House.
Some voters are dismayed.

"I want women in office," frets Betty Smith, 70, of Kirby, Ark., third vice president of the
Arkansas Federation of Democratic Women and a Lincoln supporter.

The two-term senator starts one recent day making her pitch to a dozen folks in Mount Ida
(population 936) before speeding to a lunch hosted by the Pike County Democratic Women's
Committee in Glenwood. She drops by the Murfreesboro City Hall to honor the local high school
Quiz Bowl team, stops at a chicken-processing plant to shake workers' hands and then — as
twilight falls and the marching band tunes up — works the crowd at a tailgate party before the
football game at Nashville High School.

At nearly every stop, her vote for the sweeping law that overhauled the health care system
draws hostile questions, including from former supporters.

Smith and friends filled dozens of paper bags with homemade sandwiches and cookies, hoping
to draw a noontime crowd to hear Lincoln speak in Glenwood. But the turnout is small, and
most of the lunches go uneaten.

"When I go around the county, what I hear is, 'Oh, I did vote for Blanche Lincoln before, but I'm
not this time because she voted for health care,' " Smith says during the question-and-answer
session, her singsong mimic making her exasperation clear. Lincoln launches an 18-minute
defense of the law that expands Medicaid, imposes new regulations on the insurance industry
and mandates that in 2014 nearly every American must have health insurance coverage.

When she's finished, John Plyler, 53, remains unconvinced.

If Congress wanted to control health care costs, he says, the bill should have done more to curb
medical lawsuits. He's worried about the legislation's effect on the lumber yard he owns, which
has 37 employees.

The bill doesn't affect small businesses with fewer than 50 workers, Lincoln tells him. "I know
what it's going to cost me from what the Chamber (of Commerce) and the NFIB (National
Federation of Independent Business) told me," he replies. The groups criticize the law as an
overreach of government power.

He voted for Lincoln six years ago, Plyler says, but this time he's casting his ballot for Boozman.

Reading #3

This is a book review from the Economist magazine.

MODERN mechanised warfare, with soldiers and civilians alike struck down in huge numbers by
industrial killing machines, is often said to have started in the fields of Flanders in 1914. But it
can also be argued that it had its ghastly birth 60 years earlier, on the north coast of the Black
Sea. For its protagonists—the leading European powers of the day—the Crimean war was
certainly the most significant conflict of the second half of the 19th century. If deaths from
disease are included, it cost at least 750,000 lives, two-thirds of them Russian, and it triggered
big social and cultural changes in all the countries affected.

Its defining event, the year-long assault on the Russian fortress of Sebastopol (depicted above),
was conducted with high-tech efficiency: the besiegers fired up to 75,000 artillery rounds a day
in an early version of “shock and awe”. And the human consequences of war were relayed to
the public at home with speed and unsparing honesty by journalists such as William Russell of
the Times, who blazed a trail for generations of war reporters. When the Russians finally
abandoned Sebastopol, they left about 3,000 wounded whose condition Russell described in
horrific detail: injuries infested with maggots, broken limbs protruding through raw flesh.

Yet for all its modernity, the fighting was also a “holy war” for each belligerent power. Leaders
used religious rhetoric and ordinary soldiers and sailors said their prayers as they tried to make
sense of what they were doing. That, presumably, is the point Orlando Figes, a historian at
Birkbeck College in London, is making with his British subtitle, “The Last Crusade”. His book
reveals the strange mixture of meanings the war had for its combatants. He puts the conflict
into its broader context: the determination of Britain (and with some reservations, France) to
stem Russian expansion and to bolster Islam in its fight with eastern Christianity.

No, that last point is not a mistake. The great historical paradox of the Crimean war—and of the
longer-term Russo-Turkish conflict of which it was one episode—is that Anglican England and
Roman Catholic France were aligned with Islam’s sultan-caliph against the tsars who saw
themselves as the world’s last truly Christian emperors. Above all, the western Christian powers
were determined to avoid any reversal of the Muslim conquest of Istanbul: “The Russians shall
not have Constantinople” chorused an English music-hall song.

How did the various players in this strange religious game explain themselves to their own
pious subjects? For the theocracies of Russia and Turkey, and their God-fearing soldiers, things
were fairly straightforward: they were fighting, respectively, for Christianity and Islam.
It was harder, you might think, for the Church of England and the Catholic establishment in
France to explain their support of the caliphate. In fact, they found it easy enough to construct
the necessary arguments. First, British and French clerics demonised Russian Orthodoxy as a
semi-pagan creed. Second, they maintained that in some peculiar way the Ottoman empire was
more friendly to its Christian subjects than the tsar was. (The Ottomans tolerated Protestant
missionaries, so long as the evangelisers limited their search for souls to Orthodox Christians.)

In the spring of 1854, as the Crimean fighting began in earnest, an Anglican cleric declared that
Russian Orthodoxy was as “impure, demoralising, and intolerant as popery itself”. What could
be more natural, then, than to team up with Islam and popery to cleanse that terrible impurity?
A French newspaper, meanwhile, gave warning that the Russians represented a special menace
to all Catholics because “they hope to convert us to their heresy”.

As Mr Figes recalls, the tactical friendship between Western Christians and Ottoman Muslims
had its limits. To be sure, British envoys to the Holy Land probably found more in common with
lordly Ottoman administrators than with the exuberant faith of Orthodox Christian peasant-
pilgrims. But not all Muslim Turks were overjoyed at being embraced, and hailed as Christian-
friendly, by Western powers. When in 1856 the sultan yielded to Western pressure and granted
Christians some equality, there was a backlash from the Islamic establishment across the
empire.

It is a complex tale, told vividly by Mr Figes. Perhaps it should serve as a healthy cold shower for
any modern civilisational warrior who sets out to present the course of history as a simple tug-
of-war between Christianity and Islam.