eely Regién de Murcia & Consejeria de Educacion, Formacién y Empleo C=C ESCUELA OFICIAL DE IDIOMAS cciyy = S » DE CARAVACA DE LA CRUZ CURSO C2.1 FEBRERO 2019 COMPRENSION ESCRITA NOMBRE: DNI: GRUPO: CALIFICACION GLOBAL: (1 APTO ONO APTO NOTA /25 TAREAS: La prueba de comprensi6n escrita consta de TRES tareas. NENSION ESCH DURACION TOTAL; 90 minutos INDICACIONES: ++ Las dos tareas se desarrollarén en los espacios indicados. ‘+ Debe emplearse tinta azul o negra. El uso del lapiz no es valido. ** Corregir tachando el texto. No usar correctores liquidos o cintas. + La suma total de las tareas es de 25 puntos. La calficacién de “Apto” corresponderd a una puntuacién ‘gual o superior a 13 puntos. Una tarea sin puntuacién alguna supondra la calificacién de "No Procede’, * No escribir en las zonas sombreadas. Son para uso del profesor. INGLES Escaneado con CamScanner COM?‘or questions 1 — 10, ERCISE 1: You are going to read an extract from an arlicle about painting BE example 0. those from the sections (A~ E). The sections may be chosen more than once. 9. | People’s reaction towards the way in which the artist represented female characters. B The inscrutable nature of the subjects, i The artist's ability to give an insight into temperament. a The integrity of the image portrayed. az ‘The view that the artist was an innovator. z Delight in a painting's ability to endure. | The background to a painting being well documented. Bi The view that a painting's impact depends on its surroundings. a’ painting which gives an image of a lost world. a ‘Admiration for an artist who dared to challenge conventional ideas. a Conflicting opinions about the subject of a painting. ET OES = MVE C21 COMPRENSION ESCRTA = FEBRERO Escaneado con CamScannerCOMPRENSION ESCRITA NIVEL C2.1 FEBRERO 2019 ‘Art experts give their opinions A. LUISA SUTTON A Bar at the Folies-Bergére, by Edouard Manet EIN Manet was inviting some kind of response in the way in which he presented women in his work and he succeeded in bringing the gap between classical traditions and painting modern life. Above all, | have tremendous respect for the fact that he was a breakthrough artist: a champion of realist modernism who was censured for breaking the mould. Through the medium of painting, Manet constantly reassessed the prevailing attitudes of the world he was living in. Today we are used to multiple perspective ~ seeing the same image from g different angles. This was not so in Manet's time, and in this painting we see him crossing boundaries as he ‘switches reality by employing a mirror to reflect his subjects. B. PAUL HARRIS Henry VII, 29 October 1505, by unknown artist Visually, this is a stunning portrait; Henry moves towards the viewer from the parapet wearing the red robes of Lancaster, his hands on the ledge. It is immediately exciting and emotive. Henry VII was on the lookout for a new bride and this was painted to be sent to the court of Maximilian, much as we would send a photo today. So the provenance is clear. Portraits of other English monarchs, Richard Il in particular, are, in comparison, stiff and remote. Henry VII's portrait speaks in a very particular way. His eyes look at one. He is Renaissance Man but, at the same time one sees a shrewd, wise and wily man who, throughout his reign, managed to amass the fortune of Tudor dynasty. C. TOM NEWMAN James VI and |, 1618, by Paul Van Somer | used to work for an art handling company in New York, and I came to realise how wonderful paintings are as entities. Old paintings last for so long because of the materials used — the oil is so robust, it expands or contracts depending on the heat. They can be rolled up and taken around the world, they'll never die. This Portrait, in particular, made a huge impression on me. Works of art often lose their power as soon as they're placed in a museum. This painting is where it belongs ~ in a palace. Subject to who you speak to, James is either a buffoon or a tactical genius, but in this work he looks so stately. The painting was clearly commissioned to convey regality — and it worked on me, 400 years later. D. PAULA SMITH Mr and Mrs Andrews, by Gainsborough | chose this painting as it has personal relevance for me. | grew up in my grandmother's house in London. She was an excellent copyist of Gainsborough. We had copies of all of his paintings, except for this one, which my grandmother didn't approve of. I've always found it incredibly beautiful though. The two figures in this wonderful Painting have very enigmatic expressions. What are they up to? What are they thinking? And then what are We to make of the landscape? It's an agricultural scene, in the middle of the day, but there are no agricultural workers anywhere to be seen. Where on earth is everybody? What a strange atmosphere the place has, a long ago era that will never be recaptured. E. LYNN D'ANTON An Old Woman Cooking Eggs, 1618, by Velazquez What is most striking about this painting is surely its veracity. One gets the feeling that one is looking into @ oom in which there are no obstacles to understanding. Nothing comes between the subject and the observer. The artist here is the perfect observer. When | saw it a few years ago in the National Gallery of Soolland, set alongside many other works from Velazquez’s youth, there was no doubt in my mind that it was a masterpiece. | think that itis easy for many people to empathise with this painting in one way or another. GES = VEL C21 COMPRENSION ESCATA -—_FEBREROZDIS Escaneado con CamScannerEnea "7 kk z ; TT SE 7 Some years ago, scientists at Comell University released photographs of 2 guitar no larger than a human blood cell, ts strings just one hundred atoms thick. This Lillputian instrument was sculpted from crystalline silicon, using an etching technique involving a beam of electrons. The implications of being able to develop machines that are too small to be seen with the naked eye are breathtaking, but we should not lose sight of the fact that nature got there first. The world is already full of nanomachines: they are called living cells. Each cell is packed with tiny structures that might have come straight out of an engineer's manual. Minuscule tweezers, scissors, pumps, motors, levers, valves, pipes, chains and even vehicles abound, Individually, atoms can only jostle their neighbours and bond to them if the circumstances are right. Yet collectively, they accomplish ingenious marvels of construction and control, unmatched by any human ‘engineering. Somehow nature discovered how to build the intricate machine we call the living cell, using only the raw materials to hand, all jumbled up, Even more remarkable is that nature built the first cell from scratch. Like any urban environment, there is much commuting going on. Molecules have to travel across the cell to meet others at the right place and the right time in order to carry out their jobs properly. No overseer supervises their activities — they simply do what they have to do. While at the level of individual atoms life is anarchy, at this higher level, the dance of life is performed with exquisite precision. Even nowadays, some people flatly deny that science alone can give a convincing explanation for the origin of life, believing that the living cell is just too elaborate, too contrived, to be the product of blind physical forces alone. Science may give a good account of this or that individual feature, they say, but will never explain how the original cell was assembled in the first place. It would be wrong, however, to suppose this is all there is to life. To use the cliché, the whole is more than the sum of its parts, The very word ‘organism’ implies cooperation at a global level that cannot be captured in the study of the components alone. Without understanding its collective activity, the job of ‘explaining life is only partly done. = With the discovery of DNA, however, this mystery was finally solved. Its structure is the famous double helix, discovered by Crick and Watson in the early 1950s. The two helical strands are attached by cross-links and we can imagine the whole shape unwound and laid out to make a ladder, where the handrails are the two unwound helices and the rungs the cross-links, Each rung is actually a pair of bases joined end to end and it is here that geometry comes in. A is tailor made to butt neatly with T, while C and G similarly slot together snugly, though the forces that bin these base pairs in their lock-and-key fit are in fact rather weak. Imagine the two handrails being pulle apart, breaking all the base pairs, as if the ladder had been sawn up the middle, Each would be let with a row of complementary projecting arms. S82 INGES - -MVELCZ1~—_COMPRENSON ESCRTA -FeaReROZoN9 Escaneado con CamScannerSo long as the base-pairing rules work correctly, this is guaranteed to be identical to the original. However, no copying process is perfect, and itis inevitable that errors will creep in from time to time, altering the sequence of bases — scrambling up the letters. If the message gets a bit garbled during replication, the resulting organism may suffer a mutation. Viewed like thi, life is just a string of four- letter words, for we are defined as individuals by these minuscule variations in DNA. EXERCISE 2: Read the text carefully, Read paragraphs Al and fit them correctly within the toxt Siven (there is one extra paragraph you don't need). Option 0 is an example. A | Can such a magnificently self-orchestrating process be explained or might the mystery of life be, in the end, impenetrable? In 1933, the physicist Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, concluded that life hides its secrets from us in the same way as an atom does. B | Itis this templating that is the basis for the replication process and ullimately, the recipe for life. If a DNA molecule is pulled apart and if there is a supply of free base molecules - As, Gs and Ts — floating around, they will tend to slot in and stick to these exposed stumps and thereby automatically reconstruct a new strand. | Near the top of my list of its defining properties is reproduction. Without it, and in the absence of immortality, all life would sooner or later cease. For a long time, scientists had very little idea how organisms reproduce themselves. Vague notions of invisible genes conveying biological messages from one generation to the next revealed litte. D | Of course, there's more to it than just a bag of gadgets. The various components fit together to form a smoothly functioning whole, like an elaborate factory production line. The miracle of life is not that it is made of nanotools, but that these tiny diverse parts are integrated in a highly organized way. E | Boiled down to its essentials, this secret can in fact be explained by molecular replication. The idea of a molecule making a copy of itself may seem rather magical, but it actually turns out to be quite straightforward. The underlying principle is in fact an exercise in elementary geometry. F || beg to differ. Over the past few decades, molecular biology has made gigantic stides in determining which molecules do what to which. Always it is found that nature's nanomachines operate according to perfectly ordinary physical forces and laws, No weird goings-on have been discovered, G | The former perform a purely scaffolding role, holding the molecule together. The business part of DNA lies with the latter, which are constructed from four different varieties of molecules or bases, with the chemical names adrenaline, guanine, cytosine and thiamine — let's use their initials for simplicity's sake. H | As a simple-minded physicist, when | think about life at the molecular level, the question | keep asking is: How do all these mindless atoms know what to do? The complexity of the living cell is immense, resembling a city in the degree of its elaborate activity. Each molecule has a specified function and a designated place in the overall scheme so that the correct objects get manufactured. = resreno zoe Escaneado con CamScanner