KÁROLI GÁSPÁR UNIVERSITY, DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS

BASIC EXAM PRACTICE TEST 1

Answer all the questions. Indicate your answer on the separate answer sheet and mark
your code. Give only ONE answer. If you change your mind, correct your answer on the
answer sheet unambiguously. Marks will not be deducted for wrong answers; your total
score will be the number of the correct answers you give.

PART ONE: MULTIPLE CHOICE

For questions 1-15, choose the word or phrase which best completes each sentence.

1. After telling him the bad news, Tim left John alone to..............the information.

A. take up B. digest C. dispel D. confer

2. I only had lunch an hour ago, but I’m starting to feel a little.............already.

A. ravenous B. famished C. peckish D. stuffed

3. Taking dangerous chemicals out of the chemistry lab is...................

A. forbidden strictly B. entirely forbidden C. forbidden fully D. pretty forbidden

4. Taking part in high-risk activities can be a(n)...............feeling.

A. fearless B. exhilarating C. daunting D. desperate

5. Working in a messy environment can..........your energy.

A. empty B. sap C. block D. delimit

6. Suzanne chose to see the loss as a minor..............rather than a catastrophe.

A. crash B. setback C. outburst D. dispute

7. Exceeding the speed limit is a....................of the law and will not go unpunished.

A. deception B. regulation C. violation D. misconception

8. A local entrepreneur made a very...................donation to the animal shelter.

A. profitable B. sizable C. dramatic D. urgent

9. Living alone helps me learn how to ………………..

A. stand on my own two feet B. have a change of mind C. see eye to eye
D. get it off my chest

10. Mary finally ………………. the initiative and started to organize the trip.

A. got B. took C. found D. did

11. I can usually drink ……………… I want, but today I feel ill.

A. whatever B. anything, which C. whichever D. which

12. Harry is clever but he can't ……………………………………..his ideas.

A. brush up on B. pore over C. put across D. catch up

13. Because he paid ………………. attention to the warning, Tim fell off the ladder.

A. a little B. few C. a few D. little

14. Sue left the capital and moved to the countryside ……………… working on a farm.

A. in order to B. so that C. with the aim of D. owing to

15. Little Tim has a ……………. fascination with garbage trucks; he watches them every
morning.

A. big B. deep C. wide D. long

PART TWO: WORD-FORMATION

For questions 16-20, read the sentences below. Use the word in capitals to form a word
suitable that for context. Note that zero affixation (i.e. no affix attached) is not allowed.

16. In Hungary, people normally tip gas station _____________ a few hundred forints.
ATTEND

17. The food on the table smelled delicious and looked absolutely ____________
RESIST

18. I had a classmate at school who _________________ interrupted the teachers during
lessons.
CONTINUE

19. An unconventional sense of humor provides a refreshing _________ to the book’s more
serious content.
POINT

20. Doctors should ___________ their patients about possible dangers of the procedure.
LIGHT
 PART THREE: SENTENCE REWRITING

For questions 21-25, complete the second sentence so that it has a similar meaning to the
first sentence, starting and ending with the words given.

21. Jim was disappointed because his company had outsourced his department to Poland.

Jim would have preferred ____________________________________________ his

department to Poland.

22. Claire thought it would be a good idea if they all visited Aunt Sissy.

Claire suggested ____________________________________ Aunt Sissy.

23. ”I have taken your airpods”, my sister admitted.

My sister admitted to __________________________ airpods.

24. Brad is a far more skilled programmer than anyone in the team.

No other _____________________________________ Brad.

25. Logan didn’t eat all day and felt faint in the evening.

Not _______________________________________ in the evening.

PART FOUR: ERROR DETECTION

In the following sentences below one out of the four underlined expressions is incorrect. For
questions 26-30, choose the incorrect part.

26. If I were you, I applied for that job that is being advertised on the company’s website.
A B C D

27. She is convinced that a cup of cocoa before going to bed can help you sleeping better.
A B C D

28. People who are blind or visually impaired deal with a great deal of difficult situations
A B C
daily.
D
29. Peter was the first of my friends joining a charitable organisation as a volunteer, but now
A B C

several others have done so.

D

30. Under normal conditions, your mobile phone will recharge in less then thirty minutes.
A B C D

PART FIVE: GAPPED TEXT

I come home as I have done several times in the past year, travelling on three buses. The first
bus is large, air-conditioned, fast, and comfortable. People on it pay _____(31) attention to
each other. They look out at the highway traffic, which the bus negotiates with superior ease.
We travel west then north from the city, and after fifty miles or ______(32) reach a larger,
prosperous market-and-manufacturing town. Here with those passengers who are going in my
direction, I switch _______(33) a smaller bus. It is already fairly full of people whose journey
home starts in this town – farmers too old to drive anymore, and farmers’ wives of all
_______(34); nursing students and agricultural college students going home for the weekend;
children _________(35) transferred between parents and grandparents. This is an area with a
heavy population of German and Dutch settlers, and some of the older people are speaking in
one or another of those languages. On this leg of the trip you may see the bus stop to
__________(36) a basket or parcel to somebody waiting at a farm gate.

The thirty-minute trip to the town where the _________(37) change is made takes as long as,
or longer than, the fifty-mile lap from the city. By the time we reach that town the large
good-humored descendants of Germans, and the __________(38) recent Dutch, have all got
off, the evening has grown darker and chillier and the farms less tended and rolling. I walk
across the road with one or two survivors __________(39) the first bus, two or three from the
second – here we smile at each other, acknowledging a comradeship or __________(40) a
similarity that would not have been apparent to us in the places we started from. We climb
onto the small bus waiting in front of a gas station. No bus depot here.

PART SIX: READING COMPREHENSION

For questions 41-50, read the following passage and answer the questions in Parts A and B.

'Feet, what do I need you for?' How lockdown fired up Frida Kahlo

Frida Kahlo made a dramatic entrance to her only solo show in Mexico City. The artist arrived
by ambulance and had to be stretchered into the gallery. Her sick bed, which had preceded
her by truck, awaited her. The tequila flowed.
The 46-year-old artist, who had less than a year to live, spent many months confined to bed
by injury and illness during her short life. But her bedroom in La Casa Azul, the family home
in Mexico City that she transformed into a sanctuary and menagerie, was where she
blossomed as an artist.

“She made art out of her pain and her frustration,” says the author Jessie Burton, who
painted her own writer’s hut blue as a homage to the Mexican artist’s home in Coyoacán.
“Being contained not just in her house but in a bed for so long meant her art was almost like
a metaphysical resistance. She was going to break out of those four walls, express herself and
tell her story through painting.”

Kahlo’s life story, a triumph of creativity against the odds, makes her a role model for an
artist in quarantine. Most of her paintings are modest in size but pack a powerful punch.
While Diego Rivera, her older and more famous husband was painting murals in Detroit in
the 1930s, she was painting an early masterwork, the nude self-portrait Henry Ford Hospital,
to channel the grief and trauma of losing a child, coupled with the death of her mother. It is
the first depiction of a miscarriage in western art history.

Back in Mexico, her bedroom was a safe haven but it was also a stage. Burton says that there
is always an element of performance in her art and the way she fashioned her image. “All of
these paintings are gestures of keeping up one’s spirit, accepting one’s lots and doing the
best with it but there were a lot of complicated things going on.”

Kahlo might seem the modern artist most suited to self-isolation but she would have hated
not being able to socialise and flirt. One of several lovers, the artist Isamu Noguchi, had to
flee the Casa Azul when almost caught in bed with Kahlo by a gun-toting Rivera. Noguchi
recalled: “Everything that she couldn’t do, she loved to do. It made her absolutely furious to
be unable to do things.” That included dancing, despite her disabilities.

“The worse she felt, the more she would adorn herself,” says Circe Henestrosa, who
co-curated the V&A’s Frida Kahlo show in 2018. The artist survived polio as a child but it left
her with a withered and shortened right leg. She wore long skirts and three pairs of socks to
disguise her disability from a young age. Kahlo’s pelvis was smashed in a bus crash, aged 18.
Henestrosa explains that Kahlo used her distinctive style, a blend of traditional Mexican
Tehuana dresses, and modern European fashion, to draw focus from the torso up, and so
distract attention from her wounded body.

In the year she spent bed-bound after the crash, Kahlo abandoned her plan to become a
doctor and turned to art. The artist’s familiarity with death, which she nicknamed “la
pelona,” the bald one, meant she never pulled her punches on canvas. She had no hesitation
about portraying blood, her own and other’s. The American playwright and politician Clare
Boothe Luce was shocked to receive a portrait she commissioned from Kahlo of a mutual
friend. The Suicide of Dorothy Hale depicts the death of the aspiring actor, who jumped off a
skyscraper. It is one of Kahlo’s most surrealist works, a label she rejected. “I never painted my
dreams,” she said. “I painted my reality.”
Kahlo’s art also continues to resonate today because of her radical politics. An idiosyncratic
mix of communism, Mexican pride and lapsed Catholicism, she was a far more outspoken
critic of America than her husband. Henestrosa points to a late, unfinished self-portrait of
1954 in which Stalin looms over Kahlo. It is not the kind of image reproduced in Kahlo kitsch
and merchandise.

Henestrosa had just finished installing an exhibition of the artist’s extraordinary wardrobe in
San Francisco’s de Young Museum when coronavirus hit. The clothes and paintings now hang
in darkened galleries. The museum’s director, Thomas Campbell, who hopes to extend the
loans so the show can reopen, says that Kahlo’s words - “Feet, what do I need you for when I
have wings to fly?” - have become an inspirational mantra during the lockdown.

When ill and near death, Kahlo recalled in her diary an earlier period of confinement. As a
child, struck down with polio, (8) she would breathe against the window of her bedroom and
draw a door through which she escaped in her imagination.

Like the elderly Matisse, painting and collaging in the south of France, Kahlo transformed her
mundane surroundings into something magical. But unlike the French artist, there was
nothing soothing about her art.

41. The reason why the 46-year-old Kahlo was carried on a stretcher into the gallery where
her first and last solo show was held is that
A. she had had an accident shortly before the event
B. she wanted to make her entrance dramatic and quirky
C. her pelvis had been shattered in an accident almost 30 years earlier
D. she was dying at the time and passed away a few days after the show

42. The Casa Azul was

A. a hotel where Kahlo spent time with her lover Isamu Noguchi
B. Diego Rivera’s mansion
C. an art gallery where Kahlo exhibited her paintings
D. Kahlo’s family home

43. The painting entitled Henry Ford Hospital is a particularly important work of art because

A. it is the first nude self-portrait by a female artist

B. miscarriage had never been depicted before
C. it has helped many women to recover from the trauma of losing a child
D. it was commissioned by Henry Ford to be displayed in the hospital

44. According to Henestrosa, Kahlo dressed in an eye-catching manner, wearing traditional

Mexican dresses and a lot of jewellery in order to

A. draw attention to her beautiful face and hair

B. proclaim her Mexican pride
 C. distract herself from feelings of frustration
D. divert attention away from her disfigured lower body

45. Dorothy Hale, the subject of one of Kahlo’s paintings,

A. wanted to become an actress

A. wanted to become a doctor
B. was an American playwright
C. was a friend of Clare Boothe Luce’s that Kahlo had never met in person

46. The unfinished self-portrait of 1954 which also depicts Stalin next to the artist is never
reproduced for commercial purposes because

A. it is not completed
A. it conveys the radical and controversial political views of the artist
B. the imagery in the painting represents a mixture of communist, nationalist and
Catholic values in a confusing manner
C. it offers a harsh criticism of the United States

47. The quote “Feet, what do I need you for when I have wings to fly?”
A. will be the title of the Kahlo exhibition when it reopens
B. is taken from a poem that Kahlo used as an inspirational mantra during periods of
confinement
C. is being repeated by ordinary people during the pandemic to give them courage
D. was originally said or written by Kahlo and it inspired Campbell to curate the
exhibition in the de Young Museum

48. According to the text, Kahlo’s disability was a result of

A. a suicide attempt
B. childhood polio
C. a bus crash
D. both B and C

49. The overall tone of the article

A. is critical of Kahlo’s art

B. is appreciative of Kahlo both as an artist and as a person
C. conveys admiration for Kahlo’s art but also reservations about her ideas and
behaviour
D. aims to hold her up as a role model of patient and dignified suffering

50. The author’s purpose in choosing to write about Kahlo in particular is

A. to generate interest in an ongoing exhibition in San Francisco

B. to draw attention to the artist’s home in Coyoacán as a popular tourist attraction
C. to focus attention on an artist who spent considerable time in confinement and
isolation similarly to how people find themselves locked in their apartments today
D. to dispel popular misconceptions about her life and art