Part A.

LISTENING
I. For questions 1 – 5, complete the notes below.
Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER for each answer.
MAN: Good morning, Synmouth Museum. Can I help you?

WOMAN: Oh yes. Good morning. I'm interested in the children's workshops and I'd

like a little more information, please.

MAN: Do you mean the Art and Craft workshops?

WOMAN: Yes. A friend of a friend mentioned them - the children do painting and

make models and so forth.

MAN: Yes, of course. Um, where to begin? First of all, as you probably know, they
run every Saturday.

WOMAN:Fine. And what about ages?

MAN: Well, all ages from five upwards are welcome, though we do ask that
children below eight years of age are accompanied by an adult.

WOMAN:Fine. That wouldn't be a problem. What about cost?

MAN: Well, I think you'll find them very reasonable. It's £2.50 a child, with 80
pence off for two or more children from the same family.

WOMAN:Oh yes, very reasonable. And are they held in the main museum?

MAN: Not exactly. They're nearby.

WOMAN:Could you give me the full address? I don't know the area very well.
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MAN: Yes, it's Winter House.

WOMAN:Right.

MAN: And that's in Tamer Street.

WOMAN:Could you spell that please?

MAN: Yes, T-A-M-E-R Street.

WOMAN:Lovely.

MAN:
And I do need to tell you that there's a security entrance, so you need to
press the green button for someone to let you in. Don't press the red button
please, but don't worry, it's all clearly labelled.

WOMAN:OK. And one more question - is parking available nearby? We're driving in

from out of town.

MAN: Your best bet is to leave your car at the back of the library - on a Saturday
morning there are plenty-of spaces there. It's right next door to the museum.

WOMAN:And can I ask about booking places?

MAN: Yes, and I must tell you, you really should book by calling the education
departmenthere.

WOMAN:

Oh, I'm sorry, should I have rung them instead of the main museum

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 number?

MAN: No, that's fine this time, please don't worry. But for future reference, I'll give
you the direct number. It's two hundred-seven-six-five.

WOMAN:Great, I've got that.

II. You will hear a radio interview with the gardening experts Jed and Helena Stone. Listen
and indicate the most appropriate response, A, B, C, or D.

Interviewer: Jed Stone's best known now for his talented as a garden designer - but he and his
wife Helena ran a highly successful jewellery business in the nineteen nineties,
which brought them fame and high living. Then they lost it all and some years
later, bought a derelict house which they renovated and now together they've
created a garden. They join me in the studio today. You do seem to do most things
in partnership, like the jewellery business, but using Jed's name. Why's that?
Helena?

Helena: Well, this is a bit of a bone of contention, actually. We have a friend in PR who
said, "You have a great name, Jed Stone. People would pay a fortune for such a
good name." But, sadly, at the time, it never crossed my mind that I wouldn't get
the credit for what we do, and that does get to me sometimes - but, there again, I'm
very bad at putting myself forward. People see Jed as a figurehead, which is fine,
actually, because I don't enjoy being recognized or get any thrill out of that,
whereas Jed loves it.

Interviewer: Is that right, Jed?

Jed: Obviously, I'd love to say, "No, I don't," but yeah, I do. Even as a child, I thought
it must be marvelous to walk down a street and have people know who you were.
Ironically, that's the worst of it now. It would be nice just to go and buy a paper
without somebody saying something. But I suppose I do like being a public figure.

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 It gives me a sense that I've done something people appreciate. It doesn't stop me
doing anything, but it does modify how I do it.

Interviewer: But Helena, you did appear on our television screens briefly as a presenter on The
Travel Show. That must have been a dream job, travelling around the world?

Helena: Actually, I thought I was being heroic taking that job. I'd actually rather have gone
down a coal mine. It was ironic really, because Jed adores travelling, whilst I hate
it. The timing was critical though; I mean, we were living in this derelict house.
We'd knocked huge holes in the walls to make windows and we could hardly
afford to get the job finished and I wanted to be there when it was done. So I
genuinely didn't want to do the job they were offering, but I felt I had no choice
because, apart from anything else, it would provide us with a reasonable income.

Interviewer: So what about this jewel garden? Did you have a clear idea of what you wanted to
do when you bought the house?

Jed: Not at all. In fact, we were provoked into action. I was giving a lecture on
gardening and I was including some snaps of our own wilderness to show what
certain plans looked like. But these photos hadn't loaded onto my laptop properly,
and you couldn't see a thing. So I started to make it up - describing this jewel
garden with magical colours - It came straight out of my imagination, it hadn't
been a long-term plan or anything. Anyway, as soon as I'd finished, these
journalists came rushing up saying, "We must come and take pictures of your
jewel garden." And I heard myself replying, "Fine, but come when the colours are
good, don't come now." To cut a long story short, we had make the jewel garden
before they came, and actually, we did ninety per cent of the work that summer.
That was out incentive!

Interviewer: And why did you call it a "jewel garden"? Having read about the disasters with the
jewellery business, one would have thought you wouldn't want the word "jewel"
in your house at all.

Helena: Well, I'd like to work on projects and if you have a project where you're thinking
only of jewel colours then that starts to limit you, and design is all about

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 reduction. Really it was just a good, positive way of tackling what plants we were
putting in, and the way we were going to design the garden, wasn't it, Jed?

Jed: Yeah. But for me it was also partly a metaphor, it's making something worthwhile
out of a failure. We did spend years doing the jewellery and it wasn't all
disastrous; there were good things about it too and we wanted to salvage them and
treasure them. It seemed a waste not to take that bit of our lives and to somehow
incorporate it into our new design venture - to take the bad experience and use it in
a creative way.

Interviewer: Jed and Helena, thank you for telling us about it today.

III. For questions 11 - 15, you will hear the historian, George Davies, talking about society
and the theatre in England in the time of William Shakespeare. Decide whether the
following statements are true (T) or false (F).

You now have one minute to look at Part Two.

Interviewer: We welcome today professor George Davies from the University of Wales.
Professor Davies is an expert on society in sixteenth-century England, the time of
Queen Elizabeth the First and, of course, Shakespeare. So how would you
categorize society at that time, Professor?

Professor: Well, it was certainly a society undergoing dramatic changes in which there was
an explosion of interest in the language, even though the printed word hadn't
become universally available. We don't quite know exactly how many people
could read and write but literacy would not have extended to all levels of society.
Some historians call it an illiterate society, but that seems rather pejorative. No,
the best way of putting it, in my view, is to refer to it as a pre-literate society, like
most societies that have ever been on planet. In fact our society, in which we tend
to expect everybody to be literate, is the one which is out of step.

Interviewer: So how did this pre-literacy affect ability to communicate at that time?

Professor: What it meant was that the prime form of communication was direct speech, face

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 to face, which means communication involving the body, the stance, the distance
between people. It also meant that people were much more finely tuned to the
spoken word, they could take in more of it, they could listen in a more acute way.
It's therefore quite natural that the art form which corresponds to that particular
situation should be drama.

Interviewer: One thing that has always puzzled me is where did the actors in the sixteenth
century learn their craft? Were there any drama schools then?

Professor: Well, Shakespeare's actors, the boys and the older men in his company, didn't
actually have any acting training before they joined his company. You see, in
Shakespeare's day you learned your school work by repeating it out loud all day
long. The arts of oratory and rhetoric were part of your normal education and they
were also the means by which you learned. So they had wonderful voice training,
which enabled them to develop an individual style.

Interviewer: I've always thought of the Elizabethan society as one that revelled in its voice, that
at its heart delighted in giving voice to words. Would that be correct?

Professor: I would certainly think that the atmosphere in the average theatre of the time
would surprise us today. I believe it would sound and feel more like a present day
football ground! In a modern theatre there's a sort of reverential hush as the
darkness descends and we feel, you know, that we're in some sort of temple
devoted to the worship of great art. But then, the atmosphere would have been
much noisier. Remember Shakespeare and his contemporaries had theatres which
were open to the sky, and so the noise of the city, the shout of the street sellers, the
neighing of horses and so forth would add to and mix with the sounds of the stage
and indeed, in my view, would comment on them.

Interviewer: So, in the same way, this was not a world for the shy or the softly spoken?

Professor: Not at all. People's voices in the sixteenth century, it seems to me, wouldn't have
been geared to the exchange of intimate revelations about the self. This is a notion
of speaking that is a twentieth-century concept, as is our notion that a play should
give you the intimate, personal feelings of the author or of a character on the
stage. Then, art was largely about external issues, how a country should be
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 governed, how one should deal with rebellion, questions of that order.

Interviewer: Fascinating, Professor. I'd like at this point to bring in another speaker who is
going to tell us about Elizabethan court life and how Shakespeare......

IV. For questions 16 - 25, listen to a piece of VOA news about the huge increase in obesity
and fill in the missing information.
Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS taken from the recording for each answer in the
spaces provided.

You now have one minute to look at Part Three.

Globally, one in three adults is now considered overweight or obese. In 1980 it was one in
five.
The Future Diets report analyzed existing data and found the (11) steepest rise has been in
developing nations like Mexico and Egypt, where people are spending their increasing (12)
disposable incomes on fatty sugary foods. Numbers almost quadrupled from 250 million to (13)
904 million.
The report also said that western countries which (14) have been dealing with the obesity
problem for longer have so far failed to (15) tackle it effectively.
It highlighted a more successful (16) mass campaign in South Korea to train women how to
prepare traditional (17) low-fat meals.
The report suggests following the example of some American states in taxing things like
(18) fizzy drinks and sugary sweets. It also warns if current global trends continue, there will be
a huge increase in (19) heart attacks, strokes and (20) diabetes.