Practice Test Webset EUROEXAM LEVEL C1

Reading
Question Paper

Time: 50 minutes

• Answer all the questions.

• You may write on the question paper but make sure you
write all your answers on the separate Answer Sheet.
• You must not speak to the other candidates.

• You may use a dictionary throughout this test.

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Task One: Paragraph Headings (10 minutes) – Questions 1-6

You will read about tabloid journalism.

• Match each paragraph to the correct heading.

• Place a X in the appropriate box on your Answer Sheet.
• The first one has been done for you.
• There are two extra paragraph headings that you DO NOT need.

Paragraph Headings
A A WINNING LAYOUT

B WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?

C THRILLED BY CALAMITY - EXAMPLE

D THE POWER OF SUBCULTURE

E WHY SO CHEAP?

F TEACHING LESSONS IN ETHICS

G THE CAMERA CANNOT LIE

H COMPACT AND SHOCKING

I SNAPSHOTS TRIGGER NEW BOOM

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Tabloid journalism
EXAMPLE C 4
Tabloid journalism has been in existence for several It was with the establishment of New York’s
centuries now. “People have long been fascinated Illustrated Daily News on June 26, 1919 by Joseph
by death, adversity and tragedy, and one could Medill Patterson, that tabloid journalism started
argue that turning these tragedies into entertainment growing again at an incredible pace. America’s first
is... natural... Sensational appeals, by engaging picture tabloid brought photos on events such as
the emotions of the audience, serve as a powerful explosions, hunger strikes and executions. During
rhetoric of persuasion for moral and political the years between 1920 and 1945, at a time when
arguments”. history shaped sensationalistic newspapers, it
contributed to history through photographs and
stances on political issues.
1
The word “tabloid” itself has several definitions. In 5
1884 it was trademarked as a name for compressed
drugs. Beginning in 1901, “tabloid” was used to In fact, the use of pictures was one of the primary
identify a special type of newspaper - one that reasons Joseph Patterson gave for printing the
was condensed, usually half the size of a normal Illustrated Daily News in the morning, for in a letter
newspaper. These papers were commonly identified he stated, “…all morning New York papers are alike
with boisterous, brief news content, some fiction, and none of them print pictures”. Contrary to other
and often they blatantly appealed to the human papers, the Daily News could even be appealing to
interest in crime, sex, and disaster. the flood of immigrants in New York that had yet to
perfect their English. It was written on a level that
was easy to understand and relate to.
2
But tabloid journalism found its roots prior to the 20th 6
Century in sensationalism of the time, laying the
foundation for the tabloid market of today. One of the Over the years, tabloid journalism has become an
first mass circulation objects of sensationalism was important facet of our everyday life. From reporting
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, (1570) which shows, quite on the events and news in a non-biased manner,
explicitly, the consequences of the moral codes of to shaping significant events of time through its
the religious authorities. It tells the dramatic story sensationalistic flare, tabloid journalism can be
of some of the most thrilling periods in Christian argued to be as important to history as the historical
history. events on which it report. One can see how the
use of sensationalism has affected the depiction
of history, and one should be aware of the power
3 that media possesses to shape the pages of history
whether correct or not.
Tabloids, as we know them today, were known as
“penny papers” in the 1830’s and 1840’s. The New
York Sun, founded in 1833 by Benjamin Day, was the
first successful “penny paper” in America. The Sun’s
sensational news formula first appeared in lap-sized
tabloid format and gained a daily circulation of
20,000 within two years of life, possibly larger than
any other daily in the world up to that time. Over
the next two decades many metropolitan printers
tried to launch penny papers but only a handful had
success.

Remember to copy your answers onto

the Answer Sheet.
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Task Two: Extended Text (20 minutes) – Questions 7-14

You will read an article about the writer, Milan Kundera.

• Below are 3 questions about the text.

• Each answer requires several pieces of information.
• Answer each question with as FEW words as possible. You do not need to write full sentences.
• You can copy from the article, but do not write more than 15 words for each piece of
information.

• WHAT were the FOUR key dates of and reasons for

Kundera’s joining and leaving the Communist Party of
Czechoslovakia?

• By WHAT THREE literary means did Kundera in his

poems and stories present communist ideas to make
them more appealing to ordinary readers?

• WHAT was Kundera’s SINGLE main focus on after he left

Czechoslovakia?

Important: the text lasts three pages – pages 5, 6, and 7.

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Milan Kundera – the Early Years

Milan Kundera is one of the most important

contemporary Czech writers, who has
achieved wide international recognition.
In his native Czechoslovakia, Kundera
was regarded is an important author and
intellectual from his early twenties. Each
of his creative works has contributed to
public, political and cultural discourse and
always provoked a lively debate in the
context of its time. In the first part of his
creative career, Kundera was a communist,
although he was always considered to be
an unorthodox thinker.

Milan Kundera was born in Brno in the highly cultured middle class family of Ludvík Kundera
(1891-1971), a pupil of the composer Leoš Janáček. Kundera’s father was an important Czech
musicologist and pianist and head of the Brno Musical Academy between 1948 and 1961.
From early years on, Kundera learnt to play the piano with his father. Later, he also studied
music, the influences of which can be found throughout Milan Kundera’s work.

The author completed his secondary school studies in Brno in 1948. He then started studying
literature and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University, but after two terms he
transferred to the Film Academy, where he first attended lectures in film direction and then
in script writing. After graduating in 1952 he was appointed Lecturer in World Literature at
the Film Academy.

Kundera belonged to the generation of young Czechs whose early life was greatly influenced
by the experiences of the Second World War and the German occupation. The experience
of the horrors of Nazism instilled in these young people a somewhat black-and-white vision
of reality. It propelled them towards Marxism and membership of the Communist Party. Still
in his teens and out of genuine enthusiasm, Milan Kundera joined the ruling Czechoslovak
Communist Party in 1948, but Kundera with his unorthodox artistic temperament found
following the party line hard. In 1950 he and another Czech writer, Jan Trefulka, were
expelled from the party for “anti-party activities”. Trefulka described the incident in his
novella Pršelo Jim Štěstí (Happiness Rained On Them, 1962), Kundera used the incident
as an inspiration for the main theme of his novel Žert (The Joke, 1967). Milan Kundera,
however, was re-admitted into the Communist Party in 1956, as the party line softened in
the post-Stalin era. In the 1960s the Party developed a strong reformist wing in the lead up
to the so-called Prague Spring of 1968. The new hard-line leadership, which took power
after the Soviet intervention of that year, had little time for Kundera’s political sympathies,
and in 1970 he was expelled from the Party for the second time.
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In his mature works of fiction, Kundera creates an independent, self-contained world, which
is constantly analysed and questioned from a philosophical point of view. However, it would
be wrong to regard Kundera as a philosopher. He is a proponent of no concrete school of
thinking. He greatly enjoys playing with his storylines and while analysing them rationally,
he opens up an infinite number of ways of interpreting the presented facts. As Květoslav
Chvatík has pointed out, Kundera’s mature fiction highlights the semiotic relativity of the
modern novel, seen as an ambiguous structure of signs. Playing with these signs enables
Kundera to show human existence as infinitely open to countless possibilities, thus freeing
Man from the limitation of one, unrepeatable human life. In concentrating on the sexual
experiences of his characters, Kundera analyses the symbolic social meaning of these erotic
encounters, thus being able to deal with the most essential themes concerning Man.

Kundera’s later work is the result of his unique Central European experience of disillusionment
with communism and also the product of his fascination with the West European literary
tradition, manifested in the works of Rabelais, Diderot, Cervantes and Sterne, as well as
with the Central European authors Kafka, Musil, Broch and Heidegger. Kundera’s journey to
literary maturity was relatively long. In 1945 Kundera first published translations of poetry
by the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in the journal Gong in Brno.

Milan Kundera’s first book came out in 1953 during the period of hardline Stalinism. It was
a collection of lyrical poems, Člověk, Zahrada Širá (Man, a Wide Garden, 1953). The young
author and many of his contemporaries saw this as unorthodox departure from the poetry
of “socialist realism” in Czech
literature. Poems and novels were
written about the “mass proletarian
movement”, the “class struggle”
and the “successful progression of
society towards communism”.

Člověk, Zahrada Širá is a

collection of verse in which the
author systematically attempts
to illustrate Communist Party
viewpoints in new ways. For
instance in one poem the author
feels encouraged when he hears
a young boy, playing in Brno near
a railway track, singing the hymn
of the left-wing movement, the
Internationale. Kundera uses the
atmosphere of the familiar Czech
surroundings as a symbol of comfort and peace. In all his work written before leaving
Czechoslovakia in 1975, Kundera is firmly rooted in his home environment. In Člověk,
Zahrada Širá communism in Czechoslovakia is portrayed as a guarantor of all the values
associated with his home: of everything that is cosy and reassuring.
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In one poem, an old woman is confused by the new regime. She does not understand
the political jargon of the new era. But at the end of the poem she is happy because her
grandson, a communist Young Pioneer with his red scarf on his neck, embraces her and
takes her by the hand. Kundera believed that communism was

better explained to ordinary people if it were communicated by individual experience and

by the power of human relationships.

In 1955, Kundera published a blatant piece of communist political propaganda, a long poem
Poslední Máj (The Last May), a homage to Julius Fučík, the hero of communist resistance
against the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia during the Second World War. In this poem
the communist journalist Fučík is transformed into a mythical heroic figure.

My brief review here of the young Kundera living in communist Czechoslovakia illustrates
the contrast with the mature Kundera living, since 1975, in France. The young Kundera is,
in so many ways, a reflection of communism, just as his post 1975 writings have come to be
seen parables on bourgeois French life.
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Task Three: Multiple-Choice Reading (20 minutes) – Questions 15-20

Read the following two texts about scientific journals.

• Answer the questions that follow each text.

• Place a X in the appropriate box on your Answer Sheet.

The Cost of Knowledge

The Cost of Knowledge was a protest by academics against the business practices of
academic journal publisher Elsevier. Among the reasons for the protests were a call for
lower prices for journals, and for increased open access to information. The main work of
the project was to ask researchers to sign a statement committing them not to support
Elsevier journals by publishing, performing peer review, or providing editorial services for
these journals.
Before the advent of the internet, it was difficult for scholars to distribute the articles
that present their research results. Historically, publishers performed services including
proofreading, typesetting, copy editing, printing, and worldwide distribution. In modern
times, all researchers became expected to give the publishers digital copies of their work
which needed no further processing – in other words, the modern academic is expected
to perform duties traditionally assigned to the publisher, and for which, traditionally, the
publisher is paid in exchange. For digital distribution, printing was unnecessary, copying
was free, and worldwide distribution happens online instantly. Internet technology, and
with it the aforementioned significant decrease in overhead costs, enabled the four major
scientific publishers - Elsevier, Springer, Wiley and Informa - to cut their expenditures to
such extent that they could consistently generate gross margins on revenue of over 33%.
On 21 January 2012 the mathematician Timothy Gowers called for a boycott of Elsevier
with a post on his personal blog. This blog post attracted enough attention that other
media sources commented on it as being part of the start of a movement.
In February 2012, analysts of the Exane Paribas bank reported a financial impact on Elsevier
with the company’s stock prices falling due to the boycott.
On 27 February 2012 Elsevier issued a statement on its website that declared that it has
withdrawn support from the Research Works Act, a proposed law that would have prohibited
open access to federally funded research and effectively revert earlier legislation in the
United States requiring taxpayer-funded research to be freely accessible online. Later that
day, the two representatives originally sponsoring the bill issued a statement saying that
they would not push for legislative action.
While participants in the boycott celebrated the dropping of support for the Research
Works Act, Elsevier denied that their action was a result of the boycott and stated that they
took this action at the request of those researchers who did not participate in the boycott.
Shortly afterwards, Elsevier also released an open letter to the mathematics community,
stating that it plans to reduce its prices and open the archives of 14 mathematics journals
back to 1995 to the public.
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15 The protest started because academics had a problem with the…

A low prices of scientific journals.

B lack of open access to scientific research.
C lack of support with editing tasks.
D quality of peer review.

16 According to the article, publishers became more profitable because…

A of distribution becoming worldwide.

B researchers now offer to do some of the editing of their own articles.
C the cost of publishing decreased.
D the articles do not have to undergo proofreading, typesetting and copy editing.

17 After the boycott had been called...

A two legislators proposed a law that would give free access to research online.
B Elsevier apologized.
C some representatives threatened to sue Elsevier.
D the publisher acted to make some journals accessible for free.
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Date: May 27, 2013

Subject: Has anything changed?

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to inform you of my resignation from the editorial board of the Journal of
Number Theory, effective immediately. I will also be adding my name publicly to the
list of people who refrain from volunteering for, or submitting manuscripts to, Elsevier
journals.
It has been a little over a year since the boycott against Elsevier went public. The petition
has been signed by thousands of mathematicians (indeed, over 13,000 researchers in
total). There was a flurry of communication back and forth between Elsevier and our
editorial board (and those of other journals, I’m sure). But now the dust has settled, and
I must conclude that essentially nothing has changed.
Financial hardships remain in place for our libraries and institutions (even more so,
as budgets tighten these days), despite all the good reasons that access to our own
research should be becoming less expensive, not more. I’m sure you all know these
points well.
As far as I can tell, Elsevier’s responses to our concerns ended up being limited to a
slight easing off of support for legislation limiting access to our research, together with
a nominal reduction in individual journal prices. More recently, we were told of Elsevier’s
new policy that editors would receive $60 for every article they process for the Journal
of Number Theory. To me, this policy demonstrates a true inability (or unwillingness)
to understand the key part of our observation that “all the work is done for free by
volunteers, but access to that work is exorbitantly expensive”. We want access to be
less expensive; we’re not looking for extra dough in our pockets. The most generous
interpretation of this new policy’s effect is that it continues to take money away from
the research community at large, but now puts some of it in the personal pockets of a
small subset of mathematicians who don’t need it. (My personal reaction, to be honest,
was to view this as too close to bribery not to be somewhat insulting.) But this policy
uncontroversially shows, at least, the extent of Elsevier’s robust profits on its research
journals.
Of course, any issue as complicated as this one admits a wide range of reasonable
opinions and strategies, and I respect the judgment and good intentions of everyone
receiving this email. However, if any of you continue to be troubled by this situation, I
submit that now is as good a time as any to join me in resigning from JNT.

Sincerely yours,

Greg Martin
Professor, Department of Mathematics
University of British Columbia
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18 This letter was written…

A before the boycott.

B to urge researchers to sign the petition.
C to outline the steps that will follow the petition.
D as a reaction to the publisher’s response to the boycott.

19 Professor Martin believes that Elsevier’s new policy…

A is offensive.
B is a step in the right direction.
C shows that the company cannot afford to pay more.
D was difficult for him to understand at first.

20 The professor sounds...

A hopeful.
B disappointed.
C satisfied.
D confused.
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