Is nothing impossible?

It is certainly the case that believers in ‘nothing is impossible’ base the blind optimism (0)......... a kernel of truth. Strictly (9) .......... , as logicians are keen to remind us, only (10)............ which involves a logical contradiction is impossible. So two plus two cannot equal five, (11) .......... can there ever be any truly square circles. However, the limits that most of us have in (12)........... when we worry about our lives are rarely logical.

For as (13) .......... as something remains logically possible, some people can't help (14) .......... wonder if their dream might become reality. This is exacerbated by the fact that our culture encourages people to (15)............. big and believe that ‘impossibility’ is nothing more than the creation of a negative mind.

It is far simpler, though, to concentrate on levels of difficulty and chances of success. If the former are too high and the latter too low, there's hardly any point in adding ‘but it isn't impossible, (16) .......... enough desire or support’.

Reading and use of English

Part 3

For questions 17—24, read the text below. Use the word given in capitals at the end of some of the lines to form a word that fits in the gap in the same line. There is an example at the beginning (0).

Living in a digital age

Example: (0) PRECEDE: UNPRECEDED

Today, our life is filled with noise, words and images to an (0)........... degree, with people spending much of their time connected to different forms of media. Consider the 'quiet carriage’ signs found on many UK trains; these are indications that passengers must be (17) ..........requested to refrain from talking on their mobile phones.

The greatest advantages of wired living are easily  (18)......... Plugged into the web, we can research and (19) .......... much of humanity's gathered knowledge — in minutes. We have almost (20)........... capabilities, and we are becoming increasingly adept at using them. When we are unplugged, we can demonstrate the capacity to make decisions and to act on our own (21)............ . We therefore need to appreciate the value of being able to function both online and offline. However (22).......... technology becomes in the future, we need to think (23)............ and to learn how to assess its (24)........... as well as its advantages in order to make discerning use of it in our lives.

Reading and use of English

Part 4

For question 25—30, complete the second sentence so that it has a similar meaning to the first sentence, using the word given.

Do not change the word given. You must use between two and five words, including the word given. Here is an example (O).

Example:

0. Do you mind if I watch you while you paint?

OBJECTION

Do you.................................................................. you while you paint?

The gap can be filled by the words 'HAVE ANY OBJECTION TO MY WATCHING'.

Write only the missing words IN CAPITAL LETTERS.

25. How likely is it that Tom will get a place in the team?

CHANCES

What ................................................................ getting a place in the team?

26. It has never been explained why he decided to relinquish his position as director.

 DECISION

No ....................................................................... to relinquish his position as director.

27. Sam doesn't think he'll be able to come with us at the weekend.

 PROSPECT

Sam sees  .................................................. to some with us at the weekend.

28. Harry has worked hard but it remains to be seen whether he'll win the prize.

TIME

Harry has worked hard but .............................................................. whether he'll win the prize. 

29. Luigi decided not to bring up the subject of his salary at the first meeting.

NO

Luigi decided to .............................................................. the subject of his salary at the first meeting.

30. The professor said that, as far as he knows, the results of the research are accurate.

BEST

The professor said that .................................................................................. the results of the research are accurate.

Reading and use of English

Part 5

You are going to read a magazine article about graphic novels. For questions 31—36, choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text.

Graphic novels: a fresh angle on literature

Has the graphic novel — a fictional story presented in comic-strip format — finally become intellectually respectabIe?

Graphic novels have just landed with an almighty kersplat. Ten days ago, two such works were shortlisted for the Shakespeare Book Awards for the first time in the history of the prize, in two different categories. This was no publicity stunt: neither panel knew what the other had done. This is, surely, the moment when the graphic book finally made its entrance into the respectable club room of high literature. Hang on, though: can you compare a graphic novel with the literary kind? Wouldn't that be like comparing a painting with a music video? Or is it time we started seeing them as comparable mediums for storytelling? If so, what next?

Robert Macfarlane, the chairman of another major literary award, says he has no objection in principle to a graphic novel being submitted for the prize. In fact, he has taught one, Art Spiegelman's Maus, alongside the works of Russian writer Tolstoy and Don Quixote (by the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes) at the University of Cambridge, where he works in the English Faculty. ‘The idea of outlawing the graphic novel doesn't make any sense to me,’ he says. ‘I don't segregate it from the novel. The novel is always eating up other languages, media and forms.’ Graphic fiction, he says, is ’another version of the novel's long flirtation with the visual’. This is, he declares, ‘a golden age for the graphic novel’.

And he's right. We are seeing a boom in graphic novels. Since Maus was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, they have gone on to devour every literary genre going. But so far, graphic novels have politely stood aside and let conventional books win the big prizes. Now they want the vote. Fighting for the graphic novelists’ cause, astonishingly, are some hefty prize-winning writers. The English novelist and poet A. S. Byatt is passionately in favour of graphic novels competing with regular ones. Byatt, who is a huge fan of Spiegelman's Maus, thinks that French-Iranian artist Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis stands ‘head and shoulders above most novels being produced. It's more interesting and more moving. It's able to be serious because it can carry itself along on this unserious form. It allowed her to be witty about things that are terrible. And that's why it's a major work of art’.

The genius of the graphic novel, as the English writer Philip Pullman explains, is that it can bring into play so many levels of narrative by layering them on top of each other. Take American Alison Bechdel's brilliant Are You My Mothers — in a single page, she can depict a memory of being with her mother in her childhood, dialogue between herself and her mother as they chat on the phone in the present, plus an image of herself toiling at her desk, trying to write her memoir. And what Bechdel and her mum are saying on the phone links to the diaries of the early 20th-century writer Virginia Woolf, which Bechdel also brings to visual life. Try doing that with words — it would take a chapter. Bechdel does it in a few panels. That, in the end, is precisely what keeps graphic literature so distinct from prose narrative.

Graphic novels and traditional novels demand, to be sure, the same amounts of time, intellect and artistry from their authors. But that doesn't mean they're the same thing. A few years on, will you be clicking the buy button on a graphic novel as happily as you'd pick up a work by a traditional novelist? Even Bechdel confesses that her reading habits are still struggling out of the past. ‘Honestly, I would be slightly more inclined to pick up a non-graphic work,’ she says. ‘At this point, there's not a huge number of graphic novels that are about topics that interest me. But that, too, is changing. We're becoming more visually literate. There's some reason for these graphic novels creeping into the canon. We're reading differently from how we used to 200 years ago.’

Reading and use of English

Part 7

You are going to read an article about London Zoo. Seven paragraphs have been removed from the extract.  Seven paragraphs have been removed from the extract. Seven paragraphs have been removed from the extract. Choose from the paragraphs A – G the one which fits each gap (41 – 46). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

London Zoo's new Tiger Territory

London Zoo, one of the oldest in the world, is an architectural jumble. Has it £3.6m Tiger Territory put things right?

‘We have tried our best to fade into the background,’ says Michael Kozdon, architect of the new £3.6m Tiger Territory at London Zoo. It's not often you hear an architect say that, but then it's not often you have a pair of endangered Sumatran tigers called Jae Jae and Melati as clients, either. ‘In the past,’ continues Kozdon, ‘animal enclosures were all about creating an iconic architectural statement. Now the emphasis is on animal welfare, on bringing visitors as close to the creatures as possible. Our aim is to disappear.’

The enclosure's sinuous silhouette echoes the pinkish peaks of its neighbour, the Mappin Terraces, man-made range of rocky mountains that have long poked their summits above the trees, bringing a surreal air to this strange corner of the park. Built in 1914, this elevated landscape was the result of a clause governing the zoo's expansion: an additional land grab of four acres would only be allowed if the animals they housed could be visible from the rest of the park. Sadly, this sheer geological formation, erupting above the neat neoclassical terraces of north west London, has been barren since 1985, when Pipaluk, the last of the polar bears, was Finally moved out after 18 years.

‘Tigers are avid climbers,’ explains Robin Fitzgerald, the zoo's project manager. ‘They like to observe their terrain from a towering vantage point, so we've given them a habitat that lets them do exactly that — with a view out over Regent's Park.’ Describing how the poles and canopy support each other, he adds: ‘It's basically circus tent technology.’ Neatly complying with the brief to all but vanish into thin air, this means there is no need for the extra steel structures that are so common in the zoo's other mesh enclosures — such as Cedric Price's famous Snowdon Aviary.

The former now provides a cosy den for the tigers, complete with heated rocks to soothe their weary muscles, while the latter has become an elevated area for visitors, with panoramic windows looking out across the Indonesian-inspired landscaping of the enclosure. From here, you can watch the tigers happily splashing about in their pool, or scaling the feeding poles to devour chicken wings and steak.

Such practical details are a far cry from many of the zoo's more famous structures, most of which were designed to maximise exotic spectacle. Founded in 1828 as the world's first scientific zoological gardens, the site has become burdened by the weight of its own history. From the start, when it was laid out by Decimus Burton, the zoo employed architects of the highest calibre — leaving it with a legacy of protected buildings.

Next door to the Tiger Territory are the bulbous flanks of the majestic elephant and rhinoceros pavilion, designed by Hugh Casson in 1965 to evoke a herd of elephants gathered around a watering hole, their huge rumps jostling for position. Topped with triangular roof lights intended to call to mind nodding heads and swinging trunks, the pavilion was commissioned ‘to display these animals in the most dramatic way’.

The unavoidable strategy of make-do-and-mend renders London Zoo an inevitably dated institution, laden ,with rigid monuments conceived in another era that it must now either work with or around building design safari as a wildlife one. Victorian kiosks jostle uncomfortably with mock Tudor clocktowers; lichen-encrusted steel spaceframes cantilever out over brutalist concrete terraces.

London Zoo is a fascinating piece of living heritage. With its vastly increased area, near-invisible structure, and stralegic re-use of what is already there, the Tiger Territory points a promising way forward. ‘The challenge is far greater than it used to be,’ says Kozdon. ‘Before, architecture led the way. Now the best situation would be to have no buildings at all.’

A. However, theTiger Territory had other constraints to grapple With a limited area of 36 acres in one of London's most protected settings, the zoo was forced to modify what it had — in this case, a Victorian stork and ostrich house and a 1960s sea lion viewing platform, both of which had been off-limits to visitors for 30 years.

B. But this heritage is a mixed blessing. Take the 1934 penguin pool, a sleek and slender double helix of camping concrete floating above a blue oval Faces tend to fall when visitors find it empty - the bright white surfaces apparently damaged the penguins' eyes, and the concrete was too hard on their feet. It now stands as an unused but still-loved relic of a bygone age.

C. This explains its importance as an important breeding centre for tigers. Tiger Territory's two Sumatran tigers are the most genetically important pair of tigers in Europe. With high hopes for breeding resting on the pair, their cubs would be the first to be born at the zoo for more than 15 years.

D. A look inside is telling: the space for visitors far exceeds the narrow nooks created for the immense creatures. The vast structure is now home to bearded pigs and pygmy hippos —tubby, low-slung creatures that seem out of place in the building's soaring, top-lit reaches.

E. This architectural jumble all comes to a strange climax in the stripped classical facade of the 1920s aquarium, with its arched entranceway and symmetrical windows now squeezed beneath the colossal mock-rocks of what was once Bear Mountain — itself used to house tanks of water for the fish below.

F. This explains why, rather than being held in by a roof, the animals have a fine net canopy stretching above their heads — even though its silken threads are made of 3 mm steel The canopy soars above the treetops of Regent's Park like a giant spider's web.

G. Thanks to the Tiger Territory, the skyline of the zoo is now newly The new enclosure boasts several mature plane trees, as well as tall wooden feeding poles fitted with pulleys that hoist big chunks of meat aloft. So, before they can sink their three-inch teeth into lunch, the animals will first have to go up them, which suits their predatory nature.

H. These design features demonstrate a new emphasis on animal welfare. This extends to the pairing of the animals, which was meticulously planned. But if needed, the pair can be separated, along with any future cubs, into two different parts of the enclosure, connected by a glass door.

Reading and use of English

Part 8

You are going to read extracts from an introduction to a book about the study of children. For questions 47 – 56, choose from the sections (A – D). The sections may be chosen more than once.

Understanding childhood

A. Common sense suggests a child is someone who is young, who is smaller, more immature and vulnerable and in many other ways different to human adults. The pioneer anthropologist of childhood Margaret Mead believed children everywhere were ‘pygmies among giants, ignorant among the knowledgeable, wordless among the inarticulate’, Half a century later, there is good reason to challenge this universal prescription for young humanity. Children share in common that they are growing, changing and learning, but they differ in innumerable ways in the expression of growth and change, as well as in the circumstances, goals and extent of their learning. They are not universally seen as weak, wordless or ignorant. Childhood is viewed very differently depending on the geographical area under investigation and the period of time under study as well as the standpoint of the person studying it.

B. This book is as much about studying the cultural beliefs, representations and discourses of childhood as about studying children‘s physical and psychological immaturity, growth and development. Of course, the two are linked. Key questions are raised about children — their needs, competences, responsibilities and rights. Put simply, how far are they seen as innocents who need protection, nurture and training, and how far as social actors who engage with and contribute to their development, and who have a right to be heard? The near universal adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child has come to symbolize a profound and challenging shift in perspective, especially its emphasis on children‘s participatory rights. This is reflected in the way this book includes perspectives of children and young people on many of the issues being discussed.

C. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child perceives a child to be anyone under the age of eighteen, which is also consistent with much national and international legislation. But what does this vast cross-section of the world's population - in some countries nearly half the population — have in common that justifies a single formal designation? This is not just an issue of diversity between societies. It is also about the varieties of childhood within the broad age span nought to eighteen years. The child of five months is worlds apart from the child of five years, as is the five year old from the fifteen year old. In many ways, a fifteen-year-old ‘child’ has more in common with a twenty-five-year-old ‘adult’ than with a five-year-old ‘child’.

D. Developmental psychology has provided detailed descriptions of the many stages and transitions that take place within Western childhoods, which are also reflected in everydav distinctions in the English language — for example, between babies, toddlers, school children, teenagers and young people. Distinguishing kinds of childhood by finely divided ages is not universal. In some societies, children‘s ages have not always been recorded; their status has been determined by their a ties, their social class or caste and their gender, not by their age. Defining childhood as a distinctive life phase is also premised on assumptions about adulthood. There is good reason to challenge the contrast between the dependent, vulnerable, developing child and the autonomous, mature, knowing adult — for example, by acknowledging situations where adults may be vulnerable and children may be resilient.

E. A guiding principle in planning this book has been to acknowledge wherever possible that knowledge, beliefs and understanding about childhood are culturally situated. Much scientific research on childhood, especially in developmental psychology, has been criticized for presenting its conclusions as universal truths, even though the research was based on children and young people growing up in industrialized societies, especially in Europe and North America. In the same way, dominant discourses of childhood innocence have to be understood in the context of Western history and cultural traditions. This issue applies even more strongly in relation to the study of children's rights, where one of the key debates is about how far the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child projects a universalized image of the individualized child which fails to take account of competing cultural traditions.

In which section are the following mentioned?