End-of-Year Test in Reading

Read the text and choose the correct answers.

This month in Art Around the World, Fiona Hitchens visits China

My first introduction to Chinese art was an early morning walk in Beihai Park in Beijing. There, I saw elderly people writing on the pavement with paintbrushes which were a metre long! I soon learned that they were doing water calligraphy − writing in water. The words have meanings, but they are also art. The calligraphy quickly disappears, of course. But tomorrow, the old people will be back.

Temporary art like this is very popular in China. Every winter, Harbin, in northern China, is visited by sculptors and tourists from around the world. They come for the Harbin Ice Festival, when the city has huge sculptures made out of ice. The sculptures are bigger than houses, and they take weeks to make. Harbin’s freezing winter temperatures make it very difficult for the artists to work outside. But the weather also means that the sculptures will be protected until the spring.

A few days later in Tibet, western China, I watched artists make sand paintings. The pictures are full of symbols, and they have important religious meanings for Tibetan people. They look amazing, but the paintings are soon destroyed by the artists who make them. It is important for Tibetan culture to make these paintings, then have them destroyed.

Of course, not all Chinese art is temporary − some of it has been around for a very long time! Near the city of Xi’an, I visited the amazing terracotta warriors, or soldiers. In 200 BCE, 8,000 statues of soldiers were made by sculptors out of a material called terracotta. They are as big as real people and they all have different faces. An important king had the statues produced to protect his body after he died. They stayed under the ground with the dead king for over 2,000 years, until they were discovered by a farmer in 1974.

At the China Art Museum, in Shanghai, I saw wonderful 16th-century Chinese paintings of tall mountains, trees and cliffs. The paintings were beautiful, but they didn’t look very realistic to me at the time. ‘Mountains aren’t like that,’ I thought. But that was before the last stop on my trip: the mountains of Zhangjiajie National Park.

These mountains were used by film director James Cameron in his sci-fi film Avatar because they look like something from another planet. On my last weekend in China, I took a cable car up into the mountains there. Trees grew on the sides of hundred-metre cliffs, and strange towers of rock appeared out of the morning fog. It looked just like the pictures in the China Art Museum. For a moment, I felt like I was inside a Chinese painting! 

    1   What does the writer say about the people she saw in Beihai Park?

Read the text and choose the correct answers.

This month in Art Around the World, Fiona Hitchens visits China

My first introduction to Chinese art was an early morning walk in Beihai Park in Beijing. There, I saw elderly people writing on the pavement with paintbrushes which were a metre long! I soon learned that they were doing water calligraphy − writing in water. The words have meanings, but they are also art. The calligraphy quickly disappears, of course. But tomorrow, the old people will be back.

Temporary art like this is very popular in China. Every winter, Harbin, in northern China, is visited by sculptors and tourists from around the world. They come for the Harbin Ice Festival, when the city has huge sculptures made out of ice. The sculptures are bigger than houses, and they take weeks to make. Harbin’s freezing winter temperatures make it very difficult for the artists to work outside. But the weather also means that the sculptures will be protected until the spring.

A few days later in Tibet, western China, I watched artists make sand paintings. The pictures are full of symbols, and they have important religious meanings for Tibetan people. They look amazing, but the paintings are soon destroyed by the artists who make them. It is important for Tibetan culture to make these paintings, then have them destroyed.

Of course, not all Chinese art is temporary − some of it has been around for a very long time! Near the city of Xi’an, I visited the amazing terracotta warriors, or soldiers. In 200 BCE, 8,000 statues of soldiers were made by sculptors out of a material called terracotta. They are as big as real people and they all have different faces. An important king had the statues produced to protect his body after he died. They stayed under the ground with the dead king for over 2,000 years, until they were discovered by a farmer in 1974.

At the China Art Museum, in Shanghai, I saw wonderful 16th-century Chinese paintings of tall mountains, trees and cliffs. The paintings were beautiful, but they didn’t look very realistic to me at the time. ‘Mountains aren’t like that,’ I thought. But that was before the last stop on my trip: the mountains of Zhangjiajie National Park.

These mountains were used by film director James Cameron in his sci-fi film Avatar because they look like something from another planet. On my last weekend in China, I took a cable car up into the mountains there. Trees grew on the sides of hundred-metre cliffs, and strange towers of rock appeared out of the morning fog. It looked just like the pictures in the China Art Museum. For a moment, I felt like I was inside a Chinese painting! 

    2   The cold weather in Harbin

Read the text and choose the correct answers.

This month in Art Around the World, Fiona Hitchens visits China

My first introduction to Chinese art was an early morning walk in Beihai Park in Beijing. There, I saw elderly people writing on the pavement with paintbrushes which were a metre long! I soon learned that they were doing water calligraphy − writing in water. The words have meanings, but they are also art. The calligraphy quickly disappears, of course. But tomorrow, the old people will be back.

Temporary art like this is very popular in China. Every winter, Harbin, in northern China, is visited by sculptors and tourists from around the world. They come for the Harbin Ice Festival, when the city has huge sculptures made out of ice. The sculptures are bigger than houses, and they take weeks to make. Harbin’s freezing winter temperatures make it very difficult for the artists to work outside. But the weather also means that the sculptures will be protected until the spring.

A few days later in Tibet, western China, I watched artists make sand paintings. The pictures are full of symbols, and they have important religious meanings for Tibetan people. They look amazing, but the paintings are soon destroyed by the artists who make them. It is important for Tibetan culture to make these paintings, then have them destroyed.

Of course, not all Chinese art is temporary − some of it has been around for a very long time! Near the city of Xi’an, I visited the amazing terracotta warriors, or soldiers. In 200 BCE, 8,000 statues of soldiers were made by sculptors out of a material called terracotta. They are as big as real people and they all have different faces. An important king had the statues produced to protect his body after he died. They stayed under the ground with the dead king for over 2,000 years, until they were discovered by a farmer in 1974.

At the China Art Museum, in Shanghai, I saw wonderful 16th-century Chinese paintings of tall mountains, trees and cliffs. The paintings were beautiful, but they didn’t look very realistic to me at the time. ‘Mountains aren’t like that,’ I thought. But that was before the last stop on my trip: the mountains of Zhangjiajie National Park.

These mountains were used by film director James Cameron in his sci-fi film Avatar because they look like something from another planet. On my last weekend in China, I took a cable car up into the mountains there. Trees grew on the sides of hundred-metre cliffs, and strange towers of rock appeared out of the morning fog. It looked just like the pictures in the China Art Museum. For a moment, I felt like I was inside a Chinese painting! 

    3   Which is true about Tibetan sand paintings?

Read the text and choose the correct answers.

This month in Art Around the World, Fiona Hitchens visits China

My first introduction to Chinese art was an early morning walk in Beihai Park in Beijing. There, I saw elderly people writing on the pavement with paintbrushes which were a metre long! I soon learned that they were doing water calligraphy − writing in water. The words have meanings, but they are also art. The calligraphy quickly disappears, of course. But tomorrow, the old people will be back.

Temporary art like this is very popular in China. Every winter, Harbin, in northern China, is visited by sculptors and tourists from around the world. They come for the Harbin Ice Festival, when the city has huge sculptures made out of ice. The sculptures are bigger than houses, and they take weeks to make. Harbin’s freezing winter temperatures make it very difficult for the artists to work outside. But the weather also means that the sculptures will be protected until the spring.

A few days later in Tibet, western China, I watched artists make sand paintings. The pictures are full of symbols, and they have important religious meanings for Tibetan people. They look amazing, but the paintings are soon destroyed by the artists who make them. It is important for Tibetan culture to make these paintings, then have them destroyed.

Of course, not all Chinese art is temporary − some of it has been around for a very long time! Near the city of Xi’an, I visited the amazing terracotta warriors, or soldiers. In 200 BCE, 8,000 statues of soldiers were made by sculptors out of a material called terracotta. They are as big as real people and they all have different faces. An important king had the statues produced to protect his body after he died. They stayed under the ground with the dead king for over 2,000 years, until they were discovered by a farmer in 1974.

At the China Art Museum, in Shanghai, I saw wonderful 16th-century Chinese paintings of tall mountains, trees and cliffs. The paintings were beautiful, but they didn’t look very realistic to me at the time. ‘Mountains aren’t like that,’ I thought. But that was before the last stop on my trip: the mountains of Zhangjiajie National Park.

These mountains were used by film director James Cameron in his sci-fi film Avatar because they look like something from another planet. On my last weekend in China, I took a cable car up into the mountains there. Trees grew on the sides of hundred-metre cliffs, and strange towers of rock appeared out of the morning fog. It looked just like the pictures in the China Art Museum. For a moment, I felt like I was inside a Chinese painting! 

    4   Why was the author’s visit to Zhangjiajie important?

Read the text and choose the correct answers.

This month in Art Around the World, Fiona Hitchens visits China

My first introduction to Chinese art was an early morning walk in Beihai Park in Beijing. There, I saw elderly people writing on the pavement with paintbrushes which were a metre long! I soon learned that they were doing water calligraphy − writing in water. The words have meanings, but they are also art. The calligraphy quickly disappears, of course. But tomorrow, the old people will be back.

Temporary art like this is very popular in China. Every winter, Harbin, in northern China, is visited by sculptors and tourists from around the world. They come for the Harbin Ice Festival, when the city has huge sculptures made out of ice. The sculptures are bigger than houses, and they take weeks to make. Harbin’s freezing winter temperatures make it very difficult for the artists to work outside. But the weather also means that the sculptures will be protected until the spring.

A few days later in Tibet, western China, I watched artists make sand paintings. The pictures are full of symbols, and they have important religious meanings for Tibetan people. They look amazing, but the paintings are soon destroyed by the artists who make them. It is important for Tibetan culture to make these paintings, then have them destroyed.

Of course, not all Chinese art is temporary − some of it has been around for a very long time! Near the city of Xi’an, I visited the amazing terracotta warriors, or soldiers. In 200 BCE, 8,000 statues of soldiers were made by sculptors out of a material called terracotta. They are as big as real people and they all have different faces. An important king had the statues produced to protect his body after he died. They stayed under the ground with the dead king for over 2,000 years, until they were discovered by a farmer in 1974.

At the China Art Museum, in Shanghai, I saw wonderful 16th-century Chinese paintings of tall mountains, trees and cliffs. The paintings were beautiful, but they didn’t look very realistic to me at the time. ‘Mountains aren’t like that,’ I thought. But that was before the last stop on my trip: the mountains of Zhangjiajie National Park.

These mountains were used by film director James Cameron in his sci-fi film Avatar because they look like something from another planet. On my last weekend in China, I took a cable car up into the mountains there. Trees grew on the sides of hundred-metre cliffs, and strange towers of rock appeared out of the morning fog. It looked just like the pictures in the China Art Museum. For a moment, I felt like I was inside a Chinese painting! 

    5   What overall message does the article give about Chinese art?

Read the text and complete gaps 1−5 with sentences A−G. There are two extra sentences.



Lost in the translation

In 1977, American president Jimmy Carter visited Poland and tried to say something in Polish. But his translator hadn’t done a good job. He said something rude, and everyone began to laugh! It wasn’t a good start to his trip.

Translation is a difficult business. Nobody knows that better than 23-year-old Melike Kara, a translator in Istanbul. ¹_____ Because of her language skills, she gets a lot of translation work. When I asked her what the most difficult thing to translate was, she said ‘poetry’. This is because you can’t translate a poem word-by-word. It has to sound nice in the other language, too. Melike has also translated film scripts. ‘Serious films are OK,’ she says ‘but comedies are really difficult. A joke in one language simply isn’t funny in another language. So you have to think of something else.’

Melike told me that there was no writing on the screen in Turkish cinemas. Instead, she said that actors recorded new Turkish dialogue for foreign films. The translated dialogue must be exactly as long as the original words − so the on-screen actors’ mouths don’t move when there’s no sound. This takes ages to write. ‘I have to watch the film again and again,’ Melike told me, ‘until the dialogue is exactly right.  ²_____

Nowhere is translation more important than at the United Nations in New York. There I met Masoud Abadi, who works as a translator in United Nations meetings. ‘It’s a very difficult job,’ Masoud told me, ‘because I have to listen to the conversation, and translate it at the same time. ³_____ And you mustn’t miss what anyone says.’

Every day, people at the United Nations translate hundreds of important documents. These can be anything from business agreements to important political discussions. ⁴_____ And all translators at the United Nations have to speak three languages perfectly. Masoud told me he could speak four: Arabic, French, English and Farsi.

Translating documents correctly can be very important. In 1840, the British and the Maori people signed a peace agreement in New Zealand. But there were big differences between the British and the Maori translations of the agreement. ⁵_____ But today, the Maoris and the New Zealand government are still arguing about what it says!

Lost in the translation

In 1977, American president Jimmy Carter visited Poland and tried to say something in Polish. But his translator hadn’t done a good job. He said something rude, and everyone began to laugh! It wasn’t a good start to his trip.

Translation is a difficult business. Nobody knows that better than 23-year-old Melike Kara, a translator in Istanbul. 1_____ Because of her language skills, she gets a lot of translation work. When I asked her what the most difficult thing to translate was, she said ‘poetry’. This is because you can’t translate a poem word-by-word. It has to sound nice in the other language, too. Melike has also translated film scripts. ‘Serious films are OK,’ she says ‘but comedies are really difficult. A joke in one language simply isn’t funny in another language. So you have to think of something else.’

Melike told me that there was no writing on the screen in Turkish cinemas. Instead, she said that actors recorded new Turkish dialogue for foreign films. The translated dialogue must be exactly as long as the original words − so the on-screen actors’ mouths don’t move when there’s no sound. This takes ages to write. ‘I have to watch the film again and again,’ Melike told me, ‘until the dialogue is exactly right.  2_____

Nowhere is translation more important than at the United Nations in New York. There I met Masoud Abadi, who works as a translator in United Nations meetings. ‘It’s a very difficult job,’ Masoud told me, ‘because I have to listen to the conversation, and translate it at the same time. 3_____ And you mustn’t miss what anyone says.’

Every day, people at the United Nations translate hundreds of important documents. These can be anything from business agreements to important political discussions. 4_____ And all translators at the United Nations have to speak three languages perfectly. Masoud told me he could speak four: Arabic, French, English and Farsi.

Translating documents correctly can be very important. In 1840, the British and the Maori people signed a peace agreement in New Zealand. But there were big differences between the British and the Maori translations of the agreement. 5_____ But today, the Maoris and the New Zealand government are still arguing about what it says!

Read the text and complete gaps 1−5 with sentences A−G. There are two extra sentences.



Lost in the translation

In 1977, American president Jimmy Carter visited Poland and tried to say something in Polish. But his translator hadn’t done a good job. He said something rude, and everyone began to laugh! It wasn’t a good start to his trip.

Translation is a difficult business. Nobody knows that better than 23-year-old Melike Kara, a translator in Istanbul. 1_____ Because of her language skills, she gets a lot of translation work. When I asked her what the most difficult thing to translate was, she said ‘poetry’. This is because you can’t translate a poem word-by-word. It has to sound nice in the other language, too. Melike has also translated film scripts. ‘Serious films are OK,’ she says ‘but comedies are really difficult. A joke in one language simply isn’t funny in another language. So you have to think of something else.’

Melike told me that there was no writing on the screen in Turkish cinemas. Instead, she said that actors recorded new Turkish dialogue for foreign films. The translated dialogue must be exactly as long as the original words − so the on-screen actors’ mouths don’t move when there’s no sound. This takes ages to write. ‘I have to watch the film again and again,’ Melike told me, ‘until the dialogue is exactly right.  2_____

Nowhere is translation more important than at the United Nations in New York. There I met Masoud Abadi, who works as a translator in United Nations meetings. ‘It’s a very difficult job,’ Masoud told me, ‘because I have to listen to the conversation, and translate it at the same time. 3_____ And you mustn’t miss what anyone says.’

Every day, people at the United Nations translate hundreds of important documents. These can be anything from business agreements to important political discussions. 4_____ And all translators at the United Nations have to speak three languages perfectly. Masoud told me he could speak four: Arabic, French, English and Farsi.

Translating documents correctly can be very important. In 1840, the British and the Maori people signed a peace agreement in New Zealand. But there were big differences between the British and the Maori translations of the agreement. 5_____ But today, the Maoris and the New Zealand government are still arguing about what it says!

Read the text and complete gaps 1−5 with sentences A−G. There are two extra sentences.



Lost in the translation

In 1977, American president Jimmy Carter visited Poland and tried to say something in Polish. But his translator hadn’t done a good job. He said something rude, and everyone began to laugh! It wasn’t a good start to his trip.

Translation is a difficult business. Nobody knows that better than 23-year-old Melike Kara, a translator in Istanbul. 1_____ Because of her language skills, she gets a lot of translation work. When I asked her what the most difficult thing to translate was, she said ‘poetry’. This is because you can’t translate a poem word-by-word. It has to sound nice in the other language, too. Melike has also translated film scripts. ‘Serious films are OK,’ she says ‘but comedies are really difficult. A joke in one language simply isn’t funny in another language. So you have to think of something else.’

Melike told me that there was no writing on the screen in Turkish cinemas. Instead, she said that actors recorded new Turkish dialogue for foreign films. The translated dialogue must be exactly as long as the original words − so the on-screen actors’ mouths don’t move when there’s no sound. This takes ages to write. ‘I have to watch the film again and again,’ Melike told me, ‘until the dialogue is exactly right.  2_____

Nowhere is translation more important than at the United Nations in New York. There I met Masoud Abadi, who works as a translator in United Nations meetings. ‘It’s a very difficult job,’ Masoud told me, ‘because I have to listen to the conversation, and translate it at the same time. 3_____ And you mustn’t miss what anyone says.’

Every day, people at the United Nations translate hundreds of important documents. These can be anything from business agreements to important political discussions. 4_____ And all translators at the United Nations have to speak three languages perfectly. Masoud told me he could speak four: Arabic, French, English and Farsi.

Translating documents correctly can be very important. In 1840, the British and the Maori people signed a peace agreement in New Zealand. But there were big differences between the British and the Maori translations of the agreement. 5_____ But today, the Maoris and the New Zealand government are still arguing about what it says!

Read the text and complete gaps 1−5 with sentences A−G. There are two extra sentences.



Lost in the translation

In 1977, American president Jimmy Carter visited Poland and tried to say something in Polish. But his translator hadn’t done a good job. He said something rude, and everyone began to laugh! It wasn’t a good start to his trip.

Translation is a difficult business. Nobody knows that better than 23-year-old Melike Kara, a translator in Istanbul. 1_____ Because of her language skills, she gets a lot of translation work. When I asked her what the most difficult thing to translate was, she said ‘poetry’. This is because you can’t translate a poem word-by-word. It has to sound nice in the other language, too. Melike has also translated film scripts. ‘Serious films are OK,’ she says ‘but comedies are really difficult. A joke in one language simply isn’t funny in another language. So you have to think of something else.’

Melike told me that there was no writing on the screen in Turkish cinemas. Instead, she said that actors recorded new Turkish dialogue for foreign films. The translated dialogue must be exactly as long as the original words − so the on-screen actors’ mouths don’t move when there’s no sound. This takes ages to write. ‘I have to watch the film again and again,’ Melike told me, ‘until the dialogue is exactly right.  2_____

Nowhere is translation more important than at the United Nations in New York. There I met Masoud Abadi, who works as a translator in United Nations meetings. ‘It’s a very difficult job,’ Masoud told me, ‘because I have to listen to the conversation, and translate it at the same time. 3_____ And you mustn’t miss what anyone says.’

Every day, people at the United Nations translate hundreds of important documents. These can be anything from business agreements to important political discussions. 4_____ And all translators at the United Nations have to speak three languages perfectly. Masoud told me he could speak four: Arabic, French, English and Farsi.

Translating documents correctly can be very important. In 1840, the British and the Maori people signed a peace agreement in New Zealand. But there were big differences between the British and the Maori translations of the agreement. 5_____ But today, the Maoris and the New Zealand government are still arguing about what it says!