ENGLISH COMPREHENSION PRACTICE

Music
1 Music is a universal form of communication, cutting across all periods of history and
all regions of the planet. Human beings were probably inspired to produce music by the
sounds they heard in the world of nature, like birdsong and animal cries, which formed
the background of their daily existence. Even in primitive times, music played an
important part in the social life of the community – events like birth, marriage and death
had their own individual and appropriate music. The earliest written representations of
musical sound are found in India, providing a beginning for a study of the history of
music, and instruments such as flutes and various types of stringed instruments have
been recovered from archaeological sites there. Because it has the power to touch
individuals according to the moods and situations in which they find themselves,
people have also always found music to be useful on a personal level.
2 A particularly poignant story which demonstrates the power of music is told about
the 24th of December 1914. Many European countries had been engaged for four
months in a war which was to continue for almost another four years, but the soldiers in
one part of the battlefield, remembering that this was the night before Christmas,
turned their thoughts away from war towards a celebration of this important Christian
festival. Imagine the astonishment of the British soldiers when the sound of Christmas
songs being sung by enemy German soldiers drifted towards them on the clear night
air. Moved by the music, although fearful at first, men who had earlier in the day been
fighting against each other stepped from their hiding places. The language barrier was
somehow broken down, enabling limited conversations to take place. The soldiers
spontaneously put down their weapons, exchanging food gifts and even playing
football together. The Christmas Truce, as it came to be called, has come to represent
the endurance of human beings in the face of adversity, and music played an important
role.
3 Perhaps the most important turning point in the history of music was the invention of
recorded sound. In 1877 Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, and this was the
beginning of the recording industry as we know it today. The phonograph – a machine
which played back sounds – was hailed as a great scientific breakthrough and there
was a chaotic rush to invent other recording devices. These inventions often
overlapped. It is hard to imagine the interest which was aroused in improving the
recording of sound, and Edison was seen as one of the great scientific figures of the
century. Inventors were frequently involved in angry disputes to be acknowledged as
the official inventor of some improvement or other. Nowadays, a mere one hundred
and fifty years or so after its invention, recorded music affects millions of people and
involves vast amounts of money per year. It employs thousands of people, including
musicians, sound engineers and salespeople. Thomas Edison began a technology
boom which he could not even have begun to imagine.
4 Recorded sound brings a wide range of music to ordinary people who, in the past,
would have been confined to the one or two sorts of music which characterised their
tribe or their region. Recorded music crosses boundaries and cultures – if you want to
investigate the music of, say, Sri Lanka or Kenya, it is easy to do so by a trip to your
music shop or even by surfing the internet. Moreover, air travel has become more
frequent and its inexpensiveness means that people can attend cultural shows in far-
flung holiday destinations and buy recordings of the music of the countries they visit.
Before the invention of recorded music, people might have played or listened to live
music in their own homes, but in families without either musical instruments or the skill
to play them, this would clearly not have been possible. However, access to recordings
enables ordinary people nowadays to hear music as often as they like, without needing
to own or be able to play an instrument. The fact that buying recorded music is
generally cheaper than attending live performances is another attraction.
5 As far as musicians themselves are concerned, recorded music has brought about a
revolution. In the past, musicians played only in live performances, where wrong notes
might be played, but now that recordings can be corrected a perfect version of the
original can be achieved. Furthermore, although members of a live audience may spoil
a performance with, say, a fit of uncontrollable coughing or their mobile phone ringing,
this cannot happen in a recording studio. In cultures where music was not written
down, it could be forgotten and consequently lost, along with its capacity to give
pleasure to many people. Now a recording captures it for ever; moreover, the efficiency
of recording studios means that this can be done in a single afternoon.
6 However, Thomas Edison, were he to come back to our planet as a time traveller,
might not agree that the invention of recorded sound has brought nothing but good to
music. It could be argued that people have become so used to listening to recorded
sound in the privacy of their own homes that they have no motivation to attend
concerts of live music. Why should you buy a concert ticket and trudge out in the rain
to the venue when you can listen to a perfect version of your favourite music in your
own living room? When people do attend live performances, they are so used to the
‘flick of a switch’ approach to music that they have lost any sense of wonder at its
creation. At many concerts of popular music, the audience wanders in and out of the
auditorium, returning at times to listen to a favourite song or instrumental piece. The
easy availability of high-quality recorded music may also discourage some people,
especially the young, from learning to play musical instruments. Is it not likely that
potential talent will be left undiscovered because of the invention of recorded music?
7 Often, when music is recorded, the focus becomes the musician and not the music.
This is particularly true of popular music aimed at young audiences. When
disproportionate attention is directed towards the musician, this can result in pop stars
commanding outrageously high incomes. Because the world of pop music is usually
more about image than talent, recording stars are not necessarily the best musicians,
although the young people who buy their recorded music might be deluded into
thinking that they are. How many times are we bombarded by images of glamorous
pop idols staring at us from magazines or the pages of national newspapers? Their
spouses, their holidays, their homes, their clothes, their hairstyles … greedy editors
decide that we have to be told about these, whether we like it or not. And often we
don’t! Young people are frequently under pressure to purchase not only recordings of
their music, but expensive merchandise such as posters, DVDs and T-shirts. In
addition, sometimes these pop stars have a negative effect on their young audiences
by being poor role models for them in the kind of lives that they lead, often at odds with
the lifestyles advocated by the young people’s parents.
8 Throughout history, music has had many functions, ranging from providing aesthetic
pleasure to religious or ceremonial purposes. In our own time, the advent of the
internet has transformed our experience of music, because it affords us both increased
access and increased choice. Think of such diverse activities as primitive man
sounding a horn while hunting his prey, a mother soothing her baby with a lullaby, or
the school orchestra at the end-of-term concert, and you have a glimpse of the
importance of music down through the ages.
Read the passage in the insert and then answer all the questions which follow below.
You are recommended to answer the questions in the order set.
Mistakes in spelling, punctuation and grammar may be penalised in any part of the Paper.
From paragraph 1:
1 (a) Why, according to the writer, is music a ‘universal’ form of communication? [1]
(b) According to the writer, what probably inspired human beings to produce music? [1]
(c) What feature of early Indian music provides ‘a beginning for a study of the history of music’?
[1]
(d) Apart from the role that music has played in the ‘social life of the community’, what is the other
important function of music? [1]
From paragraph 2:
2 (a) Why would the soldiers be ‘fearful’ at first? [1]
(b) Why would the conversations between the soldiers be ‘limited’? [1]
(c) Pick out and write down the single word which shows that the Christmas Truce was not
planned. [1]
(d) What, according to the writer, has the Christmas truce ‘come to represent’? Answer in your
own words. [2]
From paragraph 3:
3 (a) Why did the phonograph mark the beginning of the recording industry? [1]
(b) In what two ways was the rush to invent other recording devices ‘chaotic’? Number your
answers (i) and (ii). [2]
(c) Recorded music affects millions of people ‘a mere one hundred and fifty years or so’ after
its invention. What does the use of the word ‘mere’ suggest about the writer’s attitude to the
effects of recorded music? [1]
From paragraph 4:
4 Why are ordinary people able to visit ‘far-flung holiday destinations’? [1]
From paragraph 6:
5 What, according to the writer, is the result when young people are discouraged from playing
musical instruments? [1]
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From paragraph 7:
6 (a) Explain in your own words why pop stars ‘are not necessarily the best musicians’. [2]
(b) What, according to the writer, do editors hope to gain by publishing information about pop
stars? [1]
From paragraph 8:
7 Explain in your own words the ways in which the internet has ‘transformed our experience of
music’. [2]
8 From the whole passage:
Choose five of the following words or phrases. For each of them give one word or short phrase (of
not more than seven words) which has the same meaning that the word has in the passage.
1. individual (line 5) 5. aimed at (line 69)
2. moods (line 9) 6. outrageously (line 70)
3. hailed (line 26) 7. negative (line 79)
4. investigate (line 37) 8. advent (line 83)
[5]
9 Using your own words as far as possible, write a summary of the advantages and disadvantages
of recorded music, as identified by the writer of the passage.
USE ONLY THE MATERIAL FROM LINE 35 TO LINE 81.
Your summary, which must be in continuous writing (not note form), must not be longer than 160
words, including the 10 words given below.
Recorded music means that people can choose to listen to

Passage 1
Cars
1 No invention has ever created a greater revolution than the car has, giving freedom of mobility
on an unprecedented scale for those able to afford them; people used to be restricted to the
villages where they were born, but nowadays car owners have been liberated from the narrow
confines of their homes. A journey of a few miles on foot could easily take more than an hour,
unlike the speed of such journeys by car. Linked to this revolution came the possibility of
greater social interaction, resulting in wider circles of friends and increased communication
with families. Greater flexibility in work also came about: it was possible to live in the country
and work in town, and those already living in towns and cities could also go further afield to
work. Sprawling urban areas resulted; for example, modern London is spread over hundreds
of square miles. The modern city with its surrounding industrial and residential suburbs is
largely a product of the car industry.
2 Road building schemes launched in the mid-twentieth century in many countries, such as the
USA, Germany and Italy, meant that the car changed the appearance of whole countries as
existing roads were extended and new highways built. Although other forms of city transport
have developed, such as trams, buses and underground trains, the advantage the car has
over these is that the car alone makes door-to-door trips possible.
3 Although initially perfected in France and Germany, the car was first mass-produced on
factory assembly lines in the USA by Henry Ford; at the peak of production in the early
twentieth century his factories were responsible for an output of 10000 cars every day, thus
creating many jobs. Many countries today are involved in car manufacturing: over 19 million
people are employed in the car industry in India alone.
4 None of these changes has come without a cost. In the short term, cars have a detrimental
effect on public health because the fuel they burn gives off pollutants which can weaken
the body’s defences against diseases such as respiratory infections. Removing lead from
petrol has gone some way to addressing this problem and, additionally, most modern cars
are equipped with devices called catalytic converters which reduce toxic pollutants. Longer
term damage to the environment is caused by cars as they emit greenhouse gases which
contribute to global warming by damaging the ozone layer that protects life on earth from the
sun’s ultraviolet rays.
5 Driving a car carries many dangers, and over a million people are involved each year in
road traffic accidents, a number which is predicted to rise significantly worldwide by 2030.
Driverless cars, which at one time would have been considered mere science fiction, are
currently being developed to reduce the number of accidents caused by fallible human
beings. Because the car industry provides so many jobs in some cities, whole communities
are destroyed when car factories close, sometimes as a result of the steel needed to make
cars being manufactured more cheaply in other countries.
6 Owning a car might make people less inclined to take exercise, which has been shown to
reduce the risk of major illnesses. It is ironic that many people sit in traffic jams on the way
to their expensive gyms, when going for a walk provides exercise which is absolutely free.
Driving itself is often stressful, with drivers hunched up at the wheel, their faces screwed into a
grimace of exasperation, and the term ‘road rage’ becoming a phenomenon of our time. Cars
encourage anti-social behaviour – a quick look at a line of cars waiting at traffic lights reveals
that almost all of them contain only the driver, meaning that the pollution created by each
vehicle is caused by one single person. Such drivers are undoubtedly selfish. In an attempt to
combat this, some cities encourage people to share transport to work, or to use alternatives
like the train, with incentives provided such as free parking at the station. Many modern cities
can barely cope with their volume of traffic, and congestion is common, particularly during
rush hours when people are driving to and from work. Solutions are to stagger working hours
or to allow people to work from home; the best remedy is a congestion charge for travelling in
city centres, as has been implemented in London and Singapore.
Read Passage 1, Cars, in the Insert and answer all the questions below.
1 (a) Notes
Identify and write down the information in the passage which describes the changes created
by the car and the disadvantages the car has brought.
USE MATERIAL FROM THE WHOLE PASSAGE.
At this stage, you do not need to use your own words. Use note form. To help you get started,
the first point in each section of notes is done for you. You may find it helpful to use bullet
points when listing the content points.
You will be awarded up to 12 marks for content points.
Content Points
The changes created by the car
• Freedom of mobility
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The disadvantages the car has brought
• Fuel (they burn) gives off pollutants which can weaken the body’s defences against diseases
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1 (b) Summary
Now use your notes from 1(a) to write a summary of the changes created by the car and the
disadvantages the car has brought, as outlined in the passage.
Use your own words as far as possible. You will be awarded marks for producing a piece of
writing which is relevant, well organised and easy to follow.
Your summary must be in continuous writing (not note form). You are advised to write
between 150 and 180 words, including the 10 words given below.
The invention of the car created a revolution because it ...........................................................
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2 Re-read paragraphs 1 and 6, and identify and write down one opinion from paragraph 1 and two
opinions from paragraph 6.
Paragraph 1 ......................................................................................................................................
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Paragraph 6 ......................................................................................................................................
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Paragraph 6 ......................................................................................................................................
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[3]
Passage 2

Lila
1- In the early days of our friendship, Lila and I showed off our dolls to each other but without
appearing to; although we were in each other’s vicinity, we each pretended to be alone.
Eventually, the day came when, sitting outside next to the cellar window with the iron grating,
we exchanged our dolls, Lila holding mine and I hers. Lila inexplicably but intentionally pushed
my doll through the opening in the grating and dropped her.
2- I felt an intolerable sorrow, realising that Lila could be so mean. I was attached to my plastic
doll; she was the most precious possession I had. For me she was alive, and to know that
she was on the floor of the cellar, amid the thousands of beasts who lived there, threw me
into despair. I had never expected Lila to do something so spiteful to me. But I held back my
feelings on the edges of moistening eyes.
3- I experienced a violent pain but knew that the pain of quarrelling with her would be even
stronger. I felt strangled by two agonies, one already happening, and one possible. I said
nothing. I knew I was taking a great risk. I threw Lila’s doll, the one she had just handed
to me, into the cellar. ‘What you do, I do,’ I said immediately. Lila looked at me in disbelief,
recognising this recitation. ‘Now let’s go and get them back,’ I added.
4- We went together. At the entrance to the building, on the left, was the door that led to the cellar.
Because it was broken – one of the panels was hanging on just one hinge – the entrance was
blocked by a chain that crudely held the two panels together. Any child would be tempted, but
at the same time terrified, by the thought of forcing the door that little bit to make it possible to
go through to the other side.
5- Once through the door, with Lila in the lead, we descended five stone steps into a damp,
dimly lit space. I tried to stay close behind Lila, groping my way forward. All around were
unidentifiable objects, eerie masses, sharp or square or round. Lila worked out the position
of the narrow opening at street level above us from which we had dropped the dolls. We
felt along the rough bumpy wall; we looked into the shadows. The dolls weren’t there. Lila
searched along the floor with her hands, something I didn’t have the courage to do. Long
minutes passed. Once I seemed to see my doll and with a tug at my heart I bent over to grab
her, but it was only a crumpled page of an old newspaper. ‘They aren’t here,’ Lila said, and
headed towards the door. At the top of the steps she said, ‘Achille took them.’ Achille was a
feared neighbour, to us like the ogre of fairy tales. I abandoned my doll to her fate and ran
after Lila, who was already twisting briskly between the panels of the broken door.
6- We were forbidden to go to neighbours’ houses, but Lila decided to go to Achille’s anyway,
and I followed. That was when I became convinced that nothing in life would ever stop her,
and that every disobedient act contains breathtaking opportunities. I can still feel Lila’s hand
grasping mine as we climbed the stairs, and I like to think she decided to take it, not only
because she sensed that I wouldn’t have the courage to get to the top floor, but also because
with that gesture she herself was looking for the strength to continue. At Achille’s door my
heart was pounding. We rang the doorbell. There was silence, then a shuffling.
7 Achille opened the door. ‘Our dolls,’ said Lila. ‘They were in the cellar and you took them.’
I don’t know where she got all that confidence. I couldn’t believe we were there, and Lila
was speaking to him like that. He was staring at her in bewilderment. He repeated, as if to
understand clearly the meaning of the words: ‘I took your dolls?’
8- I felt that he was not angry but unexpectedly hurt. He stuck his hand into his trouser pocket.
We clutched each other tightly, waiting for him to bring out a knife. Instead he took out his
wallet and gave Lila some money. ‘Go and buy yourselves dolls,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘And
remember that they were a gift from me.’
Read Passage 2, Lila, in the Insert and answer all the questions below.
From paragraph 1
3 (a) What did the girls do which showed they had become good friends?
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(b) ‘Lila inexplicably but intentionally pushed my doll through the opening in the grating and
dropped her.’ Explain in your own words what the writer thinks about Lila’s behaviour at this
point.
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From paragraph 2
4 (a) The writer knew that Lila was ‘mean’. Give one word used in the paragraph which reinforces
this idea.
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(b) The writer held back her ‘feelings on the edges of moistening eyes’. What is she determined
to do?
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From paragraph 3
5 (a) What were the ‘two agonies’ felt by the writer?
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(b) The writer says ‘What you do, I do.’ Give one word used in the paragraph which shows that
this was something Lila usually said.
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From paragraph 4
6 ‘Any child would be tempted, but at the same time terrified, by the thought of forcing the door’.
Explain in your own words how the children felt about the cellar.
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From paragraph 5
7 Why were the objects in the cellar ‘unidentifiable’?
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From paragraph 6
8 (a) What was the ‘disobedient act’ carried out by Lila and the writer?
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(b) Lila took the writer’s hand because she knew the writer lacked ‘courage’ to go to the top floor.
What was the one other reason for Lila’s action?
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From paragraph 7
9 ‘Lila was speaking to him like that’. Apart from her confidence, what does this tell you about Lila’s
behaviour?
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From paragraph 8
10 Explain why the girls are surprised by Achille’s reaction to their visit.
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11 From paragraphs 2–7 inclusive
For each of the words or phrases below, circle the letter (A, B, C or D) which has the same
meaning that the word or phrase has in the passage.
(a) intolerable (line 6)
A unwanted B unbearable C unnatural D unwelcome [1]
(b) attached to (line 6)
A linked with B related to C fond of D stuck with [1]
(c) crudely (line 18)
A roughly B incorrectly C insufficiently D weakly [1]
(d) briskly (line 31)
A busily B quickly C carefully D eagerly [1]
(e) bewilderment (line 41)
A amusement B surprise C disappointment D confusion [1]