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English Test 27

Directions for Questions from 1 to 2:

In each question, there are five sentences/paragraphs. The sentence/ paragraph labelled A is in its correct place. The four that follow are labelled B,
C, D and E and they need to be arranged in the logical order to form a coherent paragraph/passage. From the given options, choose the most
appropriate option.

1. A. The economic slowdown has made it harder for many people to keep up their pace of saving for
retirement.
B. They live longer, for example, so they must pay for longer retirements.
C. But women, especially, can find it difficult in tough times to invest enough to ensure a secure
retirement.
D. Their job histories are typically shorter, too, which translates into smaller accounts.
E. After all, even under ideal circumstances, women face steeper obstacles than men in building a
proper retirement nest egg.
 

j CEBD
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j BCDE
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j EDCB
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j CEDB
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j DECB
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2. A. Barbie started as a toy, the kind of toy that got whisked off store shelves faster than Mattel, the
doll’s first maker and now, thanks to Barbie, the world’s largest toy manufacturer, could restock
those shelves.
B. Barbie never got pregnant or old; she stood her own in stores as the mute brassy standard not just of beauty but also of lifestyle.
C. With their purchasing power they voted against their own shapes, colors, and cultural identity,
Barbie found herself in the bizarre position of defining culture.
D. Around the world, she became an icon aspired to by both mothers and their daughters; who identified desperately with the rich, blonde Barbie
from that rich, blonde country.
E. Barbie’s star rose with post-war U.S. hegemony that made everyone in the world want fast-food,
appliances, Coca-Cola, and, if you were a woman, blond hair and impossibly long legs.
 

j BCDE
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j DBCE
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j CDBE
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j EBDC
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j EDBC
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Directions for Questions from 3 to 6:

Given below is a passage consisting of four paragraphs. In each paragraph the closing part of the last sentence has been left out. In each of the
following questions, from the given options, choose the one that completes the paragraph in the most appropriate way.

3. In or around 1605, European literature changed. No one realised it at the time, but when Don Quixote
set off to save the world, a new kind of writing was born. The old forms of storytelling-the epic, the
romance, the oral tale-would from now on be pitted against a boisterous young rival. Before long it
would be universally acknowledged that a reader ____________________________________ .
 

j hoping to enjoy a good story must be in search of a novel.

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j remains a literary force to be reckoned with.
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j articulates a basic human desire-the desire to be “many people, as many as it would take to assuage the burning desires that possess us.”
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j is a similar combination of irony, seriousness and principled reticence.
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j could reveal the immense, mysterious power of the pointless.
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4. The novelty of the novel is of course connected with the rise of printing, and the growth of a literate
public with time and money to spare. Beyond that, the sheer scale of the form allows storylines to be
extended and multiplied as never before, crossing and re-crossing each other with ample scope for
coincidence, surprise and contingency, and hence for the depiction of characters with whom, as William
Hazlitt put it, the reader can “identify.” But the most momentous way in which novels distinguish
themselves from other kinds of storytelling is that they give a central role to a supernumerary characterthe narrator—whose task is to transmit the
story to us. All kinds of stories invite us to imagine the characters they portray, and involve ourselves in their fortunes and their follies; but to
engage with novels we need ____________________________________ .
 
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j perplexed citizens engaged in a collective search for freedom and happiness.

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 themselves from other kinds of storytelling is that they give a central role to a supernumerary characterthe narrator—whose task is to transmit the
story to us. All kinds of stories invite us to imagine the characters they portray, and involve ourselves in their fortunes and their follies; but to
engage with novels we need ____________________________________ .
 

j perplexed citizens engaged in a collective search for freedom and happiness.

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j counting against any political aspiration that arises from nationality, identity or tribal loyalty.
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j a gradual awakening from the paranoid fictions that are flourishing.
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j to go one step further and imagine the people telling the story, or even identify with them.
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j to demonstrate the power of the imagination.
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5. The art of reading a novel involves a dash of experiment, conjecture, even risk. It requires readers to try out different narrative perspectives,
styles, even personalities, and so to explore the inherent variousness of experience, and to recognise the vein of arbitrariness that runs through
  any possible version of events. Novels, in short, are implicitly pluralistic. In this respect they resemble essays, which, as it happens, came into  
existence at more or less the same time (Montaigne launched the form in 1580, with Bacon following in 1597). Essays tend to be classier, more
learned and more demanding–there is no essayistic equivalent of the “popular novel”–and even when written in a perfectly casual style, they are
likely to be strewn with half-concealed quotations or allusions to flatter or perhaps annoy the smarter class of reader. As exercises in hesitation,
exploration and experimental self-multiplication, they are like novels, only more so. You might even say that the novel aspires to the condition of
the essay, and ____________________________________ .
 

j keeps returning to the question of “the novel form.”

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j teaches us that there is no perfect way of carving up the world or recounting its stories.
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j there is certainly no shortage of novelists who have aspired to be essayists too.
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j it has its intellectual origins in the prodigious work of a novelist.
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j is an aspect of the ever-developing human spirit.
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6. Think of Eliot or Henry James, Woolf, Forster or Orwell, or Mann, Sartre, De Beauvoir, Camus and
Mary McCarthy. And as the four recently published books now lying open on my kitchen table
demonstrate, the essay-writing novelist is still a literary force to be reckoned with. In his luminous new collection, The Curtain, Milan Kundera
argues that the special virtue of the novel lies in its ability to part the “magic curtain, woven of legends” that hangs between us and the ordinary
world. The curtain has been put there to cover up the trivia of our lives, the forgotten old boxes and bags where “an enigma remains an enigma” 
while ugliness flirts with beauty, and reason courts the absurd. These neglected spaces were redeemed for literature, according to Kundera, at the
moment when Cervantes got his readers to imagine Don Quixote as he lay dying while his niece went on eating, the housekeeper went on drinking
and Sancho Panza went on being “of good cheer.”  By inventing a narrator through whose consciousness such dumb events could be worked up
into an affecting “scene,”  Cervantes created a form of literature that could do justice to “modest sentiments”; and so a new kind of beauty–
Kundera calls it “prosaic beauty”–was born. Henry Fielding took the technique further when he created a narrator who could charm his readers
with benign loquacity, and Laurence Sterne completed the development by blithely allowing the story of Tristram Shandy
____________________________.
 

j to rent the curtain that separates us from the prose of ordinary life.
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j to pass through a long night of lyrical self-absorption.
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j to emerge on the other side in a state of bewildered, uncertain enlightenment.
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j to specialize in moral wisdom.
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j to be ruined by the character trying to recount it.
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Directions for Questions from 7 to 10:

Fill up the blanks, numbered [1], [2], [3], [4],  in the passage below with the most appropriate word from the options given for each blank.

At that time the White House was as serene as a resort hotel out of season. The corridors were [1]. In the various offices, [2] gray men in
waistcoats talked to one another in low-pitched voices. The only color, or choler, curiously enough, was provided by President Eisenhower himself.
Apparently, his [3] was easily set off; he scowled when he [4] the corridors.

7. Pick one of the following for blank [1]

j Striking
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j hollow
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j empty
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j white
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j blank
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8. Pick one of the following for blank [2]

j Quiet
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j Faded
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j Loud
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j Stentorian
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j Booming
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 j Stentorian
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j Booming
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9. Pick one of the following for blank [3]

j laughter
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j curiosity
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j humour
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j temper
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j peculiarity
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10. Pick one of the following for blank [4]

j paced
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j strolled
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j stormed
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j prowled
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j walked
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