Focus English Test

For questions 1 – 8, read the text below and decide which answer (A, B, C or D) best fits each gap. There is an example at the beginning (0).

Mark your answers on the separate answer

Studying black bears After years studying North America’s black bears in the way, wildlife biologist Luke Robertson felt no closer to understanding the creatures.

He realised that he had to (1) _______ their trust. Abandoning scientific detachment, he took the daring step of forming relationships with the Animals, bringing them food to gain their acceptance.

• A) Catch

• B) Win

• C) Achieve

• D) Receive

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CCSS.RI.11-12.3

CCSS.RI.11-12.5

CCSS.RI.8.3

CCSS.RI.9-10.3

CCSS.RI.9-10.5

The (2)________. this has given him into their behaviour has allowed him to dispel certain myths about bears.

• A) Perception

• B) Awareness

• C) Insight

• D) Vision

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CCSS.RI.11-12.4

CCSS.RI.9-10.4

CCSS.RL.11-12.4

CCSS.RL.8.4

CCSS.RL.9-10.4

(3) ______ to popular belief, he contends that bears do not

• A) Opposite

• B) Opposed

• C) Contrary

• D) Contradictory

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CCSS.RI.11-12.4

CCSS.RI.8.4

CCSS.RI.9-10.4

CCSS.RL.11-12.4

CCSS.RL.9-10.4

(4)_____ as much for fruit as previously supposed. 

• A) Care

• B) Bother

• C) Desire

• D) Hope

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CCSS.RI.11-12.4

CCSS.RI.9-10.4

CCSS.RL.11-12.4

CCSS.RL.8.4

CCSS.RL.9-10.4

He also (5) _____ claims that they are ferocious. He says that people should not be

• A) Concludes

• B) Disputes

• C) Reasons

• D) Argues

(6) _______ by behaviour such as swatting paws on the ground, as this is a defensive, rather than an aggressive, act.

However, Robertson is no sentimentalist. After devoting years of his life to the bears, he is under no

• A) Misguided

• B) Misled

• C) Misdirected

• D) Misinformed

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CCSS.RI.11-12.4

CCSS.RI.8.4

CCSS.RI.9-10.4

CCSS.RL.11-12.4

CCSS.RL.9-10.4

(7) …….. about their feelings for him. It is clear that their interest in him does no

• A) Error

• B) Doubt

• C) Illusion

• D) Impression

Tags

CCSS.RI.11-12.4

CCSS.RI.8.4

CCSS.RI.9-10.4

CCSS.RL.11-12.4

CCSS.RL.9-10.4

(8)_______ beyond the food he brings.

• A) Expand

• B) Spread

• C) Widen

• D) Extend

Tags

CCSS.RI.11-12.4

CCSS.RI.9-10.4

CCSS.RL.11-12.4

CCSS.RL.8.4

CCSS.RL.9-10.4

For questions 9 – 16, read the text below and think of the word which best fits each gap. Use only one word in each gap. There is an example at the beginning (0).

A) BECAUSE B)SUCH C) OTHER D) COULD/MAY/MIGHT E) DESPITE F) IF/WHEN/WHENEVER

G) NOTHING/LITTLE-IN

The origin of language The truth(0) nobody really knows how language first began. Did we all start talking at around the same time (9)______ of the manner in which our brains had begun to develop?

Although there is a lack of clear evidence, people have come up with various theories about the

origins of language. One recent theory is that human beings have evolved in (10)_______a way that we are programmed for language from the moment of birth. In (11) ______words, language came about as a result of an evolutionary change in our brains at some stage.

Language (12) ______Well be programmed into the brain but, (13) _______this, people still need stimulus from others around them. From studies, we know that (14)__________children are isolated from human contact and have not learnt to construct sentences before they are ten, it is doubtful they will

ever do so. This research shows, if (15) _______else, that language is a social activity, not something invented (16) ______ isolation.

• E, F, A, C, D, B, G

• A, B, C, D, E, F, G

• G, C, A, D, B, F, E

• C, D, A, G, F, E, B

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CCSS.RI.11-12.3

CCSS.RI.11-12.5

CCSS.RI.8.5

CCSS.RI.9-10.3

CCSS.RI.9-10.5

You are going to read the introduction to a book about the history of color. For questions 10-16, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text.

Introduction to a book about the history of color

This book examines how the ever-changing role of color in society has been reflected in manuscripts, stained glass, clothing, painting and popular culture. Color is a natural phenomenon, of course, but it is also a complex cultural construct that resists generalization and, indeed, analysis itself. No doubt this is why serious works devoted to color are rare, and rarer still are those that aim to study it in historical context. Many authors search for the universal or archetypal truths they imagine reside in color, but for the historian, such truths do not exist. Color is first and foremost a social phenomenon. There is no trans-cultural truth to color perception, despite what many books based on poorly grasped neurobiology or – even worse – on pseudo esoteric pop psychology would have us believe. Such books unfortunately clutter the bibliography on the subject, and even do it harm.

The silence of historians on the subject of color, or more particularly their difficulty in conceiving color as a subject separate from other historical phenomena, is the result of three different sets of problems. The first concerns documentation and preservation. We see the colors transmitted to us by the past as time has altered them and not as they were originally. Moreover, we see them under light conditions that often are entirely different from those known by past societies. And finally, over the decades we have developed the habit of looking at objects from the past in black-and-white photographs and, despite the current diffusion of color photography, our ways of thinking about and reacting to these objects seem to have remained more or less black and white.

The second set of problems concerns methodology. As soon as the historian seeks to study color, he must grapple with a host of factors all at once: physics, chemistry, materials, and techniques of production, as well as iconography, ideology, and the symbolic meanings that colors convey. How to make sense of all of these elements? How can one establish an analytical model facilitating the study of images and colored objects? No researcher, no method, has yet been able to resolve these problems, because among the numerous facts pertaining to color, a researcher tends to select those facts that support his study and to conveniently forget those that contradict it. This is clearly a poor way to conduct research. And it is made worse by the temptation to apply to the objects and images of a given historical period information found in texts of that period. The proper method – at least in the first phase of analysis – is to proceed as do paleontologists (who must study cave paintings without the aid of texts): by extrapolating from the images and the objects themselves a logic and a system based on various concrete factors such as the rate of occurrence of particular objects and motifs, their distribution and disposition. In short, one undertakes the internal structural analysis with which any study of an image or colored object should begin.

The third set of problems is philosophical: it is wrong to project our own conceptions and definitions of colur onto the images, objects and monuments of past centuries. Our judgments and values are not those of previous societies (and no doubt they will change again in the future). For the writer-historian looking at the definitions and taxonomy of color, the danger of anachronism is very real. For example, the spectrum with its natural order of colors was unknown before the seventeenth century, while the notion of primary and secondary colors did not become common until the nineteenth century. These are not eternal notions but stages in the ever-changing history of knowledge.

I have reflected on such issues at greater length in my previous work, so while the present book does address certain of them, for the most part it is devoted to other topics. Nor is it concerned only with the history of color in images and artworks – in any case that area still has many gaps to be filled. Rather, the aim of this book is to examine all kinds of objects in order to consider the different facets of the history of color and to show how far beyond the artistic sphere this history reaches. The history of painting is one thing; that of color is another, much larger, question. Most studies devoted to the history of color err in considering only the pictorial, artistic or scientific realms. But the lessons to be learned from color and its real interest lie elsewhere.

questions:

10 What problem regarding color does the writer explain in the first paragraph?

• A)There are problems of reliability associated with the artifacts available.

• B) Historians have seen color as being outside their field of expertise.

• C) Color has been rather looked down upon as a fit subject for academic study.

• D) Very little documentation exists for historians to use.