Read the following passage and choose the correct answers A, B, C or D to each question.
During the heyday of the railroads, when America’s rail system provided the bulk of the country’s passenger and freight transportation, various types of railroad cars were in service to accomplish the various tasks handled by the railroads. One type of car that was not available for public use prior to the Civil War, however was a sleeping car, ideas for sleeping cars abounded at the time, but these ideas were unworkable. It unfortunately took the death of a president to make the sleeping car a viable reality.
Cabinet-maker George M. Pullman had recognized the demand for sleeping cars and had worked on developing experimental models of sleeping cars in the decade leading up to the Civil War. However, in spite of the fact that he had made successful test runs on the Chicago and Alton Railroads with his models, he was unable to sell his idea because his models were too wide and too high for existing train stations and bridges. In 1863, after spending time working as a storekeeper in a Colorado mining town, he invested his saving of twenty thousand dollars, a huge fortune at that time and on the money that he had in the world. In a luxurious sleeping car that he named the Pioneer. Pullman and friend Ben Field built the Pioneer on the site of the present-day Chicago Union Station. For two years, however, the Pioneer sat on a railroad siding, useless because it could not fit through train stations and over bridges.
Following President Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, the state ofIllinois,Lincoln’s birthplace, wanted to transport the presidential casket in the finest fashion possible. The Pullman Pioneer was the most elegant car around; in order to make the Pullman part of the presidential funeral train in its run fromSpringfieldtoChicago, the state cut down station platforms and raised bridges in order to accommodate the luxurious railway car. The Pullman car greatly impressed the funeral party, which includedLincoln’s successor as president, General Ulysses S. Grant, and Grant later requested the Pioneer for a trip fromDetroittoChicago. To satisfy Grant’s request for the Pioneer, the Michigan Central Railroad made improvements on its line to accommodate the wide car, and soon other railroads followed. George Pullman founded the Pullman Palace Car Company in partnership with financier Andrew Carnegie and eventually became a millionaire.
Read the following passage and choose the correct answers A, B, C or D to each question from 61 to 70.
Last week I went to visit Atlantic college, an excellent private college inWales. Unusually, it gives young people much needed (61) _____ of life outside the classroom, as well as the (62) _____ to study for their exams. The students, who are aged between 16 and 18 and come from all over the world, spend the morning studying. In the afternoon they go out and do a really (63) _______ activity, such as helping on the farm, looking after people with learning (64) _______ , or checking for pollution in rivers. One of the great things aboutAtlanticCollegestudents is that they come from many different social (65) _____ and countries. As few can (66) ______ the fee of £20,000 over two years, grants are available. A quarter of the students are British, and many of those can only attend because they receive government help.
“I really (67) _____ the college for trying to encourage international understanding (68) ______ young people”, as Barbara Molenkamp, a student from theNetherlands, said “You learn to live with people and (69) _____ them. Even the ones you don’t like. During the summer holidays my mother couldn’t believe how much (70) ______ I argued with my sister.”
Read the following passage and choose the correct answers A, B, C or D to each question.
You can usually tell when your friends are happy or angry by the looks on their faces or by their actions. This is useful because reading their emotional expressions helps you to know how to respond to them. Emotions have evolved to help us respond to important situations and to convey our intentions to others. But does raising the eyebrows and rounding the mouth say the same thing inMinneapolis as it does inMadagascar? Much research on emotional expressions has centered on such questions.
According to Paul Ekman, the leading researcher in this area, people speak and understand substantially the same “facial language”. Studies by Ekman’s group have demonstrated that humans share a set of universal emotional expressions that testify to the common biological heritage of the human species. Smiles, for example, signal happiness and frowns indicate sadness on the faces of people in such far- flung places as Argentina, Japan, Spain, Hungary, Poland , Sumatra ,the United States, Vietnam, the jungles of New Guinea , and the Eskimo villages north of Artic Circle. Ekman and his colleagues claim that people everywhere can recognize at least seven basic emotions: sadness, fear, anger, disgust, contempt, happiness, and surprise. There are, however, huge differences across cultures in both the context and intensity of emotional displays – the so called display rules. In many Asian cultures, for example, children are taught to control emotional responses – especially negative ones- while many American children are encouraged to express their feelings more openly. Regardless of culture, however, emotions usually show themselves, to some degree, in people’s behavior. From their first days of life, babies produce facial expressions that communicate their feelings.
The ability to read facial expressions develops early, too. Very young children pay close attention to facial expressions, and by age five, they nearly equal adults in their skill at reading emotions on people’s faces. This evidence all points to a biological underpinning for our abilities to express and interpret a basic set of human emotions. Moreover, as Charles Darwin pointed out over a century ago, some emotional expressions seem to appear across species boundaries. Cross - cultural psychologists tell us that certain emotional responses carry different meanings in different cultures. For example, what emotion do you suppose might be conveyed by sticking out your tongue? For Americans, this might indicate disgust, while inChina it can signify surprise. Likewise, a grin on an American face may indicate joy, while on a Japanese face it may just as easily mean embarrassment. Clearly, culture influences emotional expressions.