Placement Test Quiz

Passage 1 - The Man with Thirteen Jobs

Tom lives and works on the island of Gigha in the west of Scotland. Only 120 people live in Gigha, but in summer 150 tourists come by boat every day.

He is a postman, a policeman, a fireman, a taxi driver, a school-bus driver, a boatman, an ambulance man, an accountant, a petrol attendant, a barman, and an undertaker. Also, he and his wife, Margaret, have a shop and a small hotel.

Every weekday Tom gets up at 6:00 and makes breakfast for the hotel guests. At 8.00 he drives the island’s children to school. At 9:00 he collects the post from the boat and delivers it to all the houses on the island. He also delivers the beer to the island’s only pub. Then he helps Margaret in the shop.

He says: "Margaret likes being busy, too. We never have holidays and we don’t like watching television. In the evenings Margaret makes supper and I do the accounts. At 10.00 we have a glass of wine and then we go to bed. Perhaps our life isn’t very exciting, but we like it".

Passage 2 - Food Around the World

For 99% of human history, people took food from the world around them. They ate all that they could find and then moved on. Then, about ten thousand years ago, people learned to farm the land and control their environment.

The kind of food we eat depends on which part of the world we live in, or which part of our country we live in. for example, in the south of China they eat rice, but in the north they eat noodles, in Scandinavia, they eat a lot of herrings, and the Portuguese love sardines. But in central Europe, away from the sea, people don’t eat so much fish; they eat more meat and sausages. In Australia, Germany and Poland there are hundreds of different kinds of sausages.

In North America, Australia and Europe there are two or more courses to every meal and people eat with knives and forks. In China there is only one course, all the food is together on the table, and they eat with chopsticks. In part of India and the Middle East people use their fingers and bread to pick up the food.

Nowadays it is possible to transport food easily from one part of the world to the other. We can eat what we like, at any time of the year. Bananas come from the Caribbean or Africa; rice comes from India or the USA; strawberries come from Chile or Spain. Food is very big business. But people in poor countries are still hungry, and people in rich country eat too much.

Passage 3 – Wonder Drugs 

The discovery of penicillin and other antibiotic drugs is the most dramatic medical development of the twentieth century. These new drugs quickly became known as “wonder drugs” because they saved so many lives that were threatened by major forms of infection. The research that led to their development rested on the belief that chemicals could be found that would destroy specific microorganisms without injuring the human body at the same time. Advances in chemistry and in the knowledge of bacteria quickened the discovery of such chemicals.

In 1933, the first of the sulfa drugs, prontosil, was tested clinically on humans and was found to cure blood infections that would otherwise have been fatal. In 1941, the first successful human tests of penicillin were conducted on cases of streptococcus infections. The discovery of penicillin laid the foundation for even more powerful weapons against specific diseases. Within the next decade, researchers identified some 200 antibiotic substances that were effective against one or another type of bacteria. One of the most important was streptomycin, found to be potent against tuberculosis and other infections that were not affected by penicillin.

Antibiotics gave the medical profession powerful tools that could directly fight a very wide range of specific diseases. They made possible the survival of patients during and after surgery. No longer was it necessary to depend largely on the body’s own immune system to fight off major infections; these infections could be attacked directly with drugs. Among the most spectacular effects of antibiotics were reductions in the number of deaths from pneumonia and tuberculosis.