Oxford Test 1 CPE Practice Test
Extract 1
'The Two Cultures'; what an alluring little phrase that is. Everyone has an opinion about it, but no one knows what it means - beyond the vague idea that the arts and science are worryingly separate and at loggerheads. When National Science Week begins on Friday, scientists will be trying to persuade us that science is just as important as the arts in British national culture. Are they right - or is science just a narrow specialism, increasingly in need of self-promotion?
The term 'The Two Cultures' was coined by the late C P Snow who distinguished himself not so much by attempting to work in both the arts and science, as by achieving nothing in either of them. As well as writing numerous unspeakable novels, he had a scientific career whose highlight was a well-publicized claim to have manufactured artificial vitamin A, a finding other scientists swiftly discredited. Yet only a churl would deny that he struck a chord with his 1959 lecture, when he claimed that western intellectual life 'is increasingly being split into two polar groups'. At one pole were the literary intellectuals, at the other the physical scientists.
Extract 2
We did an exercise on ticketing five years ago and discovered that 400 tickets were lost by clients every year before they'd even left the UK. But the amazing thing is the reasons - all genuine. The dog ate them, the baby threw them in the fire, the wife tore them up in a rage; that's quite apart from all the ones you'd expect, such as they were in the car and the car got stolen. If losses were going at the same ratio today, with the increase in our business, that would mean three a day.
One of my favourite stories is about a chap we were taking to the US for very serious heart surgery. The hospital was near Rochester, so they booked him to Rochester, New York. When
this chap got out, picked his bag up and went to a taxi driver and asked, 'How far to this hospital?', the cabbie replied, 'About 1,500 miles.' He was meant to go to Rochester, Minnesota. The nice part of the story is that United Airlines, who had flown him transatlantic, understood his plight and got him on the next flight to Rochester, Minnesota, no charge. The reason we know the story is not because he came back to us ranting and raving, but because he saw the funny side of it.
Extract 3
Female caller: My problem is that I just want to be loved by everyone all of the time. I can't stand rejection. I believe what everyone tells me and I think I must have ‘hurt me' written on my forehead. I always put others before myself and would go without if it meant I could make someone happy and have them like me. Why am I so insecure and how can I stop letting people walk all over me?
Expert: Well, caller, it sounds as though you may have a history of experiences in your life that have left you with a feeling of 'not being good enough'. This is not uncommon and often goes back to our childhood experiences we have had with our parents, teachers or even classmates. What we need to understand is that this is past programming. These belief systems that we have picked up along the way are old and worn-out and quite obviously aren't working. It's important now to forgive and let your past go. Begin believing in yourself and what you have to offer to others. It is incredibly helpful to use positive affirmations and repeat them daily as you discover your inner strengths. Remember to be patient with yourself.
Extract 4
Reporter: Victoria and Mark's son Freddie is now nearly five and being with his parents on location appears to have done him no harm at all. Out in the bush, his creche has included baby hippos and pythons. In fact, says Victoria, Freddie's known as 'Snakeboy'.
Victoria: That's because he's always picking them up, and walking about with them round his neck. We moved to a new location where some of the snakes were deadly, so we told him that he must call somebody before he touched a snake. So then he walked around shouting 'Somebody! Somebody!'
Reporter: Their current location looks rather exotic on film. Mark, however, is quick to dispel any notions of tasting paradise.
Mark: We live in these coconut and mangrove huts. If it's really raining, we close all the coconut leaves and it feels like you're in a wicker basket. Just before we left to come on this trip to England, it was raining so much the verandah fell down. Apart from mudslides, we've no running water. We have to go by donkey to collect water from the well. And the sleeping arrangements are very primitive. Three to a small hut. Privacy is very much a luxury of the Western World.
Part 2
Well, as you know, I've been invited to the college today to give you some advice on careers in sales, as you approach the end of your business courses. Most of what I've done has involved
sales of one sort of another, and I thought I'd start by giving you a brief summary of my own career.
My first job was with Business Traveller magazine, where I sold classified advertising over the phone. I did this for a year, coming to it from a business skills course I took. I had graduated with a degree in English, and I decided I'd better have some basic skills before throwing myself on the marketplace. So I did all the things I said I'd never do, like learning to type and do shorthand, and so on.
Three years after that, having done various other sales jobs, I became a marketing co-ordinator with Soundcraft Electronics. We made sound-mixing equipment for recording studios. This was a terrific job. I started as assistant to the chairman, and I basically created my own job, which involved dealing with the advertising and promotional side, too.
Then I joined the company I now work for, Visnews. It is a major global television news gathering organization, based in London, with branches all over the world. I joined as a marketing executive in their film library. We have a huge archive of videotape and newsreel films going back to the very beginning of motion pictures. My job was to increase revenues from the archive through usage fees. After a short while helped to start a new department which was producing and selling videos for the retail market - what we call 'sell-through' programming. These would be documentaries that people would buy, so they would usually have a special interest theme... and, of course, they'd make extensive use of our archives. Visnews Video eventually had 11 titles which we sold at retail outlets and through direct marketing techniques.
I was headhunted away from this to join Castle Communications, where my job was to sell feature films on video to the rental and sell-through markets. My job was to come up with ways to inspire our salesforce to move the merchandise. I was also responsible for developing side deals.
One time we worked a deal with a major theme park, where we used the venue for a launch event, and carried a promotion for the park on the front of the video. Meanwhile, the park cross-promoted
the video on site.
I was with Castle for a year, then I rejoined Visnews as a sales co-ordinator in the Special Locations Department, which is the operation I now head. The job involves some travel. Last week I was in Spain calling on several of our clients and building our relationships. A few months ago, I spent a week in Moscow. And what do I do? Well, I run the department that offers camera crews, editing facilities and satellite technology to broadcasters and video production companies worldwide. I have six sales coordinators working with me.
I think as you go through your career, it's very important to have a mentor. I've been lucky to have the advice of a man who works in a PR agency I dealt with when I was first at Visnews. Over the years, just having someone to talk to as I contemplated moves or wanted to discuss career activities, has been tremendously helpful. He's always been interested in what I've been doing and
very supportive. I've valued his advice most highly. OK, before we move on to ...
Part 3
Interviewer: My guest today is former government minister, Susan Graham. While always regarded as somewhat unusual, it was only after her attack on her colleague Martin Jones for his policies as senior government minister responsible for prisons, that she started to attract considerable media attention, by no means all flattering, or, indeed, relevant. Susan, as a politician, do you always act on the things you believe are right?
Susan: I've always put my views on conscience issues, always, even if I know some of them are unpopular. I put them to the electorate so that people know exactly what they're getting. I think that is important. There is one thing I do despise, actually, and I really do despise it, it's the politician who tries to have things all ways, not because he says honestly, 'Actually, I haven't made my mind up,' that's different, occasionally we don't make our minds up. But the politician who says, 'Well, actually, I think this but it's a bit unpopular so I'm going to try and dress it up and I'm going to try and present it in a different way to the electorate.' That I actually think is wrong.
Interviewer: Is politics your whole life?
Susan: Certainly I do not wish to be engaged in any other profession other than politics.
Interviewer: So what do you say to those people who feel that in the tremendous battle with Martin Jones, your political future could well have been closed off?
Susan: Oh, that was a price that I knew that I would have to pay right from the start. I'm aware that this will be open to misinterpretation, but I felt that in a way I was being brought to the time of trial. That if I let that weigh with me, that if I let my own political future weigh with me over an issue which I did consider to be enormously important in all sorts of different ways, then really it wouldn't be worth having as a political future. As I've said, to look at self-advancement in its own right, it isn't worth a damn, it really isn't.
Interviewer: You would have got support privately, I'm sure, but in the end your colleagues didn't support you publicly, did they?
Susan: No, let me make it very clear. One or two colleagues did very kindly come out in support. I actually said to them, 'No, you know, this is something I want to do alone. It is something that it is much better that I do alone without embroiling other people in it.'
Interviewer: But isn't politics always about embroiling other people?
Susan: No, it's not always about embroiling other people.
Interviewer: Very often, then, very often.
Susan: It can often be about embroiling other people but not always, not invariably. I think there are some things about which you say, 'I don't actually want to get anybody else caught up with this. This is something which I feel I've got to do.' What I said was very straightforward: I'm going to make my doubts and my reservations known. It is then entirely up to my colleagues whether they take those into account or not, and if they want to say no, they're not going to take those into account, that's up to them. I did my duty at the point that I made my doubts and reservations known. I didn't have to go any further.
Interviewer: But doesn't it affect your judgement of your colleagues that they didn't support you publicly? You felt so strongly, this is something you said was massively important.
Susan: I think every time you take a stand on something, and I have taken a number of stands in my time, then quite obviously the way that you look at your fellow MPs is going to be somewhat coloured by whether they share that stand, whether they actively oppose that stand, whether they just shrug neutrally. It would be somewhat coloured. But politics is a great kaleidoscope of changing alliances and people that you can be bitterly opposed to one day are people with whom you can be allied the next. And therefore the fact that there were some colleagues who thought I was quite mad and there were other colleagues who gave me a lot of support but made sure it was
all extremely sotto voce, and behind closed doors, that is something that I would expect and I have no doubt that there will be other issues when some of those colleagues and I will swap positions.
Interviewer: You would expect them to think you were mad?
Susan: I would expect some of them to think I'm bonkers because I'm afraid there are some politicians who believe that you should never, ever, ever, under any circumstances, do anything to rock the boat, and you should always put yourself first and I actually went against both those two great criteria.
Interviewer: Now, to change the subject, I'd like to .・・
Part 4
Sarah: I know there are people who just write all the time - letters and diaries - but I'm not aware of any compulsion. I never write letters and if I can help it I write the shortest e-mails possible. So it's not a great passion. If there's a certain story I have to tell, I get on with it, but I don't have a writing disease. Once I get started, though, then I can go on a bit.
James: There's a pleasure in having written, isn't there, Sarah?
Sarah: Well, when it's going well it's great, but when it's going badly you'd do anything to avoid it.
James: I often think that absolutely anything in the room will do to distract me from writing: television, reorganizing your old filing system. I know a lot of people who go and sit in a completely bare room, just because anything else is distracting.
Sarah: When I was starting out I used to listen to the advice that if you're a writer you should write, you should do it every day. I felt guilty for a long time that I was failing at this. But I realized that when I did do it every day, the quality of the work actually went down.
James: I think there are probably people who may never set something down on paper, but who have a novelistic way of looking at life. I think you can tell when you're talking to them that there is that sympathy there.
Sarah: I was certainly writing lots of things in my head before I ever set them down, and I have been since I was a child, perhaps because of being an only child and chattering away to myself all
day.
James: But there is definitely such a thing as natural writers, who I think are always the best writers. There are people who just can't help telling lots of stories, who are inveterate liars, though there are people who aren't natural writers who are very good.
Sarah: I heard one novelist say that he spends all day writing and comes down at the end of the day and asks his wife, 'How was your day, darling?' and thinks in his head 'as if I could care less'. That's one of the main traits of novelists, sadly: what Nabokov called a piece of ice in the heart.
James: Someone said to me 'The trouble with you is that you've got a splinter of heart in the ice'. But I think novelists are just people who don't have an office life. They don't have a friend to go and have a sandwich with at 11 o'clock.
Sarah: The weird thing about novelists is that they don't really have a lot to talk to each other about, apart from money. A lot of them are eaten up with envy.
James: But if you didn't want deep down to write a great novel, then you wouldn't sit down in the first place. No one ever sat down thinking, 'I'II write quite a good novel'.
Sarah: Most novelists secretly believe that they're the best living novelist, that they write much better than anyone else, it's just that nobody knows it.
James: Another thing is that you spend two years in your room writing away and then suddenly your work becomes a very public thing and lots of people are writing about it. It's very strange. I was pleased that the reviews were kind but I don't think it makes much difference to what you think of your book. And I've had a few stinker reviews as well. Although people try and hide them from me, I dig them out.
Sarah: I'm snowblind before my own reviews: I can't tell if they're good, bad or indifferent. The very first was probably one of the most negative. Not even particularly negative, but I felt it hadn't really understood the book. It described it as 'aggressively postmodern', and while that sounded quite cool to me, I didn't think it was really me. Oddly, that coloured my reaction to a lot of the
other reviews, and I felt for a while as though I was walking around with a big target tattooed on my chest.