METU NEW ENGLISH PROFICIENCY EXAM CAREFUL READING PART SET 2
SADECE BİREYSEL KULLANIM İÇİNDİR
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Text I A The alarming success of ISIL (The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) in recruiting teenage girls, often from non-Muslim middle-class homes, is highlighted in a new French film on which work began three days after the November 2015 massacre in Paris. In a country plagued by repeated extremist attacks and the threat of more, “Le Ciel Attendra” (Heaven Awaits) is attracting huge attention. It has even caught the interest of the French education ministry, which arranged pre-release viewings of the film for high school students in major cities across the country. B The film describes the lives of two girls, aged 16 and 17, who are radicalised online by ISIL recruiters who convince them they will find utopia by joining the extremist group. One of the girls ends up being arrested while trying to travel to Syria, and the other eventually begins a difficult process of de-radicalisation. Both characters are fictional but the director Marie-Castille Mention-Schaar says they are a mixture of real-life cases she encountered while carrying out research with Dounia Bouzar, a half-Algerian anthropologist who specialises in radicalisation. Ms Bouzar, whose Centre for the Prevention of Sectarian Abuse (CPDSI) helps families resist or deal with radicalisation, plays herself in the film – despite being initially reluctant. C Sandrine Bonnaire, who plays the mother of one of the girls depicted in the film, says that she too was hesitant about accepting the role, not least because she spent much of her childhood being cared for by a family of Muslim neighbours."But I could see the script contributed to challenging links between the religion of Muslims and Islamist fanaticism," she says. "The family that, to a large extent, brought me up were faithful, respectful and open to others. It was they who taught me all I know about Islam and it was clear the film showed, too, that Islam has nothing do with ISIL." D An estimated 40 per cent of French nationals who try to join ISIL are female, according to government statistics. Recent high-profile incidents show young women to be increasingly among them. Ms. Bouzar’s group says 70 per cent of the families who contact its hotline with concerns about female relatives aged 14 to 21 describe themselves as atheist. And in sharp contrast to the more common route of young male recruits into extremism, from delinquency and poverty in immigrant-dominated housing estates, these girls and women often show academic promise and come from professional families. E Despite ISIL’s barbarity, including the keeping of women and girls as sex slaves, the group’s propaganda techniques seduce young women with the idea that they will be treated as "precious" if they travel to Syria and Iraq, according to counter-terrorism specialists. In interviews, Ms Mention-Schaar draws parallels with religious and secular cults that attracted disappointed young people in the late 1960s. These include, most notoriously, the Charles Manson commune. Some of the commune’s members, including several young women, obeyed Manson’s orders to commit a series of murders in California. F Statistics first published by the French newspaper Le Figaro but since repeated by other French media suggest 1,954 young people in France are currently considered to have been radicalised by ISIL, 121 per cent up on the figure for January. Young women are now "more likely than boys" to be indoctrinated, according to the same source.
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G Ms Mention-Schaar says she watched ISIL propaganda videos of "unbearable violence" in order to "understand the strength of the grip the recruiters have on teenagers". "It is impossible, rationally, to conceive how one can laugh at a clip where jihadists play football with severed heads but that is what happens to some," she says. "It shows the extent their heads and their hearts have been disconnected." Adapted from: foreign.desk@thenational.ae 1. It is suggested in the text that the new French film is used by the French education ministry to ____________. a) show how French teenage girls were used in the November 2015 Paris attacks b) draw attention to extremely violent methods employed by jihadists to train the recruits c) raise awareness about the danger of ISIL’s recruitment of young French women 2. As we understand from the text, Dounia Bouzar is an anthropologist who ____________. a) codirected the film with Ms. Mention-Schaar b) helps families who got caught in radicalization c) has set up a center to counsel families who lost a member in terrorist attacks 3. The French actress Sandrine Bonnaire praises the film because she ____________. a) grew up in a Muslim neighbourhood, which familiarized her with the religion of Islam b) herself had an experience similar to the one depicted in the film c) believes the film stresses that Muslim faith and Islamic radicalism are not related 4. According to information obtained from Ms Bouzar, ISIL increasingly recruits young women ____________. a) from poor immigrant families b) from wealthier middle-class families c) who already have a criminal record 5. Recently published statistics about indoctrination show that French teenage girls ____________. a) have become more susceptible to radicalization by the terrorist group b) enter a stage of de-radicalization once they watch ISIL propaganda videos c) could only be radicalized after they have traveled to Syria or Iraq
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Text II A Earth is burning. From Seattle to Siberia this summer, flames have consumed strips of the northern hemisphere. One of 18 wildfires sweeping through California, among the worst in the state’s history, is generating such heat that it created its own weather. Fires that raged through a coastal area near Athens last week killed 91. Elsewhere people are suffocating in the heat. Roughly 125 have died in Japan as the result of a heat wave that pushed temperatures in Tokyo above 40°C for the first time. B Such calamities, once considered freakish, are now commonplace. Scientists have long cautioned that, as the planet warms—it is roughly 1°C hotter today than before the industrial age’s first furnaces were lit—weather patterns will be very unpredictable. An early analysis has found that this overheated European summer would have been half as likely were it not for human-induced global warming. C Yet as the impact of climate change becomes more evident, so too does the scale of the challenge ahead. Three years after countries vowed in Paris to keep warming “well below” 2°C relative to pre-industrial levels, greenhouse-gas emissions are up again. So are investments in oil and gas. In 2017, for the first time in four years, demand for coal rose. Subsidies for renewables, such as wind and solar power, are decreasing in many places and investment has stalled; climatefriendly nuclear power is expensive and unpopular. It is tempting to think these are temporary setbacks and that mankind, with its instinct for self-preservation, will make its way towards a victory over global warming. In fact, it is losing the war. D Insufficient progress is not to say no progress at all. As solar panels, wind turbines and other low-carbon technologies become cheaper and more efficient, their use has surged. Last year the number of electric cars sold around the world passed 1million. In some sunny and windy places renewable power now costs less than coal. E Optimists say that decarbonisation is within reach. Yet, even allowing for the familiar complexities of agreeing on and enforcing global targets, it is proving extraordinarily difficult. One reason is soaring energy demand, especially in developing Asia. In 2006-16, as Asia’s emerging economies forged ahead, their energy consumption rose by 40%. The use of coal, easily the dirtiest fossil fuel, grew at an annual rate of 3.1%. Use of cleaner natural gas grew by 5.2% and of oil by 2.9%. Fossil fuels are easier to hook up to today’s grids than renewables that depend on the sun shining and the wind blowing. Even as green fund managers threaten to pull back from oil companies, state-owned powerful organizations in the Middle East and Russia see Asian demand as a compelling reason to invest. F The second reason is economic and political inertia. The more fossil fuels a country consumes, the harder it is to wean itself off them. Powerful lobbies, and the voters who back them, insert coal in the energy mix. Reshaping existing ways of doing things can take years. In 2017 Britain enjoyed its first coal-free day since starting the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s. Coal generates not merely 80% of India’s electricity, but also underpins the economies of some of its poorest states. Authorities in Delhi are not keen to approve the end of coal, so as not to cripple the banking system, which lent it too much money, and the railways, which depend on it. 4
G Last is the technical challenge of stripping carbon out of industries beyond power generation. Steel, cement, farming, transport and other forms of economic activity account for over half of global carbon emissions. They are technically harder to clean up than power generation and are protected by industrial interests. But the world is not short of ideas to realise the Paris goal. Around 70 countries or regions, responsible for one-fifth of all emissions, now price carbon. Technologists work on stronger grids, zero-carbon steel, even carbon-negative cement, whose production absorbs more CO 2 than it releases. All these efforts and more—including research into “solar geoengineering” to reflect sunlight back into space—should be redoubled. H Yet none of these fixes will come to much unless climate slowness is tackled with direct confrontation. Western countries grew wealthy on a carbon-heavy diet of industrial development. They must honour their commitment in the Paris agreement to help poorer places both adapt to a warmer Earth and also decrease future emissions without sacrificing the growth needed to leave poverty behind. I Averting climate change will come at a short-term financial cost—although the shift from carbon may eventually enrich the economy, as the move to carbon-burning cars, lorries and electricity did in the 20th century. Politicians have an essential role to play in making the case for reform and in ensuring that the most vulnerable do not bear the brunt of the change. Perhaps global warming will help them fire up the collective will. Sadly, it looks the world will get a lot hotter first. Adapted from: www.economist.com 6. It is understood from the text that scientists had already warned that the heating up of the planet would ________. a) push the temperatures above 40°C everywhere in northern hemisphere b) cause more frequent weather-related disasters everywhere in the world c) increase the global warming by 2°C sooner than previously thought 7. The main conclusion drawn from examples given in paragraph C is that ________. a) the fight against global warming is expensive but continues with determination b) the Paris climate agreement helps countries overcome temporary setbacks in a unified way c) countries find it increasingly difficult to implement the measures that are climate-friendly
8. One reason the writer is not optimistic about decarbonisation is that the ________. a) huge rise in Asian countries’ energy needs continue to increase the investment in fossil fuels b) use of cleaner natural gas does not grow as much as the use of oil c) costs of solar panels and wind turbines have risen even in places with a lot of sun and wind 5
9. India is a good example of continuing dependence on coal because ________. a) coal is part of people’s traditional way of life they don’t want to get rid of b) the economic and financial systems of many regions in India depend on coal c) they follow Britain’s lead which had its coal-free day only recently
10. The writer believes that it is Western countries’ responsibility to ________. a) develop the steel and cement production in poorer countries b) help poorer countries to decrease their greenhouse emissions c) sacrifice their own growth in order to pay for their carbon-heavy diet
11. The writer insists that politicians should ________. a) help make the move away from carbon-burning industries as inexpensive as possible b) ensure that the costs of the reform are shared equally by all the countries c) push hard for a reform towards carbon-free economies and industries
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Text III A A migraine attack has long been passed off as ‘just a headache’. But while ‘normal’ headaches can usually be held at bay with a paracetamol or two, a migraine is aggressive, sometimes enough to be completely unbearable. It has no conclusive cause (hormones and abnormal brain activity are just two potential reasons) or sustainable treatment on offer. B Perhaps it is little surprise, then, that the world’s leading survey of health conditions across 195 countries found that, in every year from 1990 to 2016, migraine attacks remained the second-largest global contributor to years lived with disability. They come with a huge economic cost, too, causing an estimated 25 million sick days to be taken in the UK alone each year. But compared to their health and economic burden, migraines remain one of the world’s most under-funded diseases. C Migraines continue to receive the least public funding of any neurological illness in Europe. In the US, where migraines affect an estimated 15% of people, the condition received $22m in research funding in 2017. Asthma, which affects half as many people, received 13 times that amount ($286m); diabetes, affecting two-thirds as many people, received 50 times as much ($1.1bn ). (Of course, it’s worth noting that asthma and diabetes are potentially life-threatening conditions). D And even when the condition is studied, it often is affected by a trend seen in other healthcare research: most migraine research on animals has been done on males even though women suffer from migraines more. Given the prevalence of migraines among women, this apparent neglect could be a result of how physicians tend to undervalue pain in female patients. It may also reflect the historic – and similarly gendered – associations between migraines and mental illness. E. __________Ancient Egyptian scriptures from 1200 BC detail migraine-like headaches; Hippocrates wrote about the visual disturbances and vomiting commonly associated with the disorder. The actual discovery of migraines, however, is routinely credited to the ancient Greek doctor Aretaeus of Cappadocia, who accurately described their one-sidedness and symptom-free periods in the second century. (In fact, the word ‘migraine’ is derived from the Greek term ‘hemicrania’, meaning half skull). F. __________A number of questionable treatments arose in the Middle Ages from blood-letting and witchcraft to a clove of garlic being inserted into an incision in the temple. Some medical experts recommended trepanation – the drilling of holes into the skull – as a migraine remedy. The dreadful procedure was commonly used to release evil spirits from people who were more likely to have been suffering from a mental illness than demonic possession, and is one of the first supposed links between migraines and the mind. G. __________They believed the mind was to blame, describing the condition as a disorder of “mothers in the lower classes” whose minds were weak due to daily work, little sleep, frequent lactation and malnourishment. Women experiencing acute headaches were often ridiculed and seen as hysterical, starting the stigma of neurosis that still exists today. Also, in general, women were believed to have a much diminished capacity for intellectual work and, as a result, could more easily overload their ‘delicate nervous systems’. 7
H It can’t be denied that there appears to be a link between the headache disorder and mental health. Several studies have concluded that migraines are commonly associated with a range of psychiatric disorders. A 2016 review found high rates of correlation between migraines and bipolar; meanwhile, people with migraines are 2.5 times more likely to develop generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), and people with depression are three times more likely to experience migraine attacks. Another study found that around one in every six migraine sufferers have seriously considered suicide at some point in their lives. J “But whether it is causal is a big question,” says Messoud Ashina, neurology professor and director of the Danish Headache Centre’s Human Migraine Research Unit. “When you have a very prevalent disorder like migraine, the likelihood that it can overlap with other diseases is quite high. ”Of course, suffering from migraines may also lead to poor mental health – rather than a ‘delicate nervous system’ leading to migraines, as Victorian physicians believed. K Despite the effect of migraine attacks on such a vast sum of the population, the condition is surprisingly little understood or researched. “Many people in neurology and society consider migraine as a nonthreatening disease – it is not a cancer, it is not Parkinson’s,” Ashina says. “But if you look at its public and personal impact, migraine is a huge issue.”Amaal Starling, assistant professor of neurology at Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, says some specialists don’t see it as a ‘real neurology’. Headache specialists therefore have found it difficult to legitimise their practice and convince others that funding is a necessity, not a luxury. Adapted from: www.bbc.com 12. The main idea of paragraph B is that migraines _____________. a) which are not treated in their early stages may cause disability b) have not received sufficient research funding in the last three decades c) are very common health conditions that affect the economy negatively
13. How does paragraph C relate to paragraph B? a) It gives statistical support to the idea about limited funding for migraine research. b) It proves with numbers the economic costs of migraine previously emphasized. c) It shows that migraine is not a life-threatening disease despite millions of patients worldwide. 14. One reason why the writer believes that the studies on migraine are biased is that they _________. a) do not concentrate on female subjects b) do not measure the intensity of the pain c) are entirely based on research on animals 8
The first sentences of paragraphs E, F and G are taken out from the text. Match sentences a-e with the blanks. There are more sentences than you need. a) Women are more susceptible to migraine because of the greater degree of changes in their hormone levels. b) Historically, the believed cause and treatment of migraines had deep superstitious links. c) The greater number of females with migraines initially was noticed by doctors in the 19th century. d) In general, women have a harder time getting their pain symptoms taken seriously. e) These agonizing headaches are one of the human race’s oldest recorded illnesses.
15. Paragraph E ______ 16. Paragraph F ______ 17. Paragraph G ______
18. Which one of the following is NOT mentioned in the text as a link between migraine and other neurologic and mental diseases? a) People with psychiatric disorders are more likely to suffer from migraine. b) It is possible to develop depression or anxiety when you seriously suffer from migraine. c) If not treated, migraine may lead to neurologic diseases such as Parkinson’s.
19. What is the main conclusion we can draw from about migraine considering the points emphasized by the writer? a) Migraine research should receive much more funding to prove that women in fact do not suffer from the disease more than men. b) The disease should be researched much more seriously to improve the understanding of the causes and the treatment. c) The treatment of migraine should go hand in hand with the treatment of the patient’s psychiatric disorder.
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Text IV A. Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth and fortune, is the closest thing Hinduism has to an economic deity. How poorly her earthly sisters in present-day India are faring. There, women are less likely to work than they are in any country in the G20, except for Saudi Arabia. The unrealized contribution of women is one reason India remains so poor. B. Yet far from joining the labour force, women have been falling away at an alarming pace. The female employment rate in India, counting both the formal and informal economy, has tumbled from an already-low 35% in 2005 to just 26% now. In that time the economy has more than doubled in size and the number of working-age women has grown by a quarter, to 470m. Yet nearly 10m fewer women are in jobs. A rise in female employment rates to the male level would provide India with an extra 235m workers, more than the EU has of both gender, and more than enough to fill all the factories in the rest of Asia. C. Imagine the consequences. Were India to rebalance its workforce in this way, the IMF estimates, the world’s biggest democracy would be 27% richer. Its people would be well on their way to middle-income status. Beyond the obvious economic benefits are the incalculable human ones. Women who work are likelier to invest more in their children’s upbringing, and to have more say over how they lead their lives. Given that more Indian women have been beaten up by their husbands than are in work, there is room for improvement. D. The first step in reversing the dramatic drop in female employment is understanding it. Some of the fall is a sign of progress. Girls are staying in school, and thus out of the labour force, for longer. But mostly it is the result of two unwelcome trends. As households become richer, they prefer women to stop working outside the home. It is not unusual in developing economies for a family’s social standing to be enhanced by having its women remain at home. But India stands out, as its female labour-force participation rate is well below those of countries at comparable income levels. E. Social customs are startlingly conservative. A girl’s first task is to persuade her own family that she should have a job. The in-laws she will typically move in with after marriage are even more likely to pull her out of the workforce and into social isolation. In a survey in 2012, 84% of Indians agreed that men have more right to work than women when jobs are scarce. Men have taken 90% of the 36m additional jobs in industry India has created since 2005. And those who say that women themselves prefer not to work must deal with plenty of counter-evidence. Census data suggest that a third of stay-at-home women would work if jobs were available; government make-work schemes attract more women than men. F.That points to the other problem: the lack of employment opportunities. The workforce has shifted from jobs more often done by women—especially farming, where most Indian women work but are being displaced by mechanisation. At the same time, inflexible and unreformed labour markets have hampered the rise of manufacturing and low-level services, the gateway for women in other poor countries. In neighbouring Bangladesh, whose customs are not so different from India’s, a boom in garment manufacturing has increased the number of working women by 50% since 2005. In Vietnam three-quarters of women work. But the mega-factories that boosted female employment there are largely absent in India. 10
G. What can be done? Many of the standard answers fall short. Promoting education, a timetested development strategy, may not succeed. Figures show that the more schooling an Indian woman receives, the less likely she is to work, at least if she has anything less than a university degree. Likewise urbanisation, another familiar way to alleviate poverty: city-dwelling women are half as likely as rural ones to have a job. H. A huge amount can be achieved in the intimacy of people’s homes. Indian women do 90% of the housework, the most of any large country. Gentlemen, spending just two hours a week doing the dishes or putting the kids to bed, would cause a 10% increase in female labour participation, according to a World Bank study. If this participation raised GDP by $550bn, as the McKinsey Global Institute, a think-tank, has suggested, it would surely be the easiest half-trillion-dollar boost available to the global economy—and to one of its poorest countries, too. I. An optimist might argue that more women are not working because India is still paying for the sins of the past, when so many of them were illiterate and high fertility rates bound them to the home. Most measures of female welfare are improving. India has many more girls in classrooms and fewer child brides than it once did. But simply waiting for that progress to trickle down into the labour market ignores India’s depressing recent record. The socially conservative bent of the Hindu-nationalist government of Narendra Modi makes it an unlikely champion of women’s rights. Other countries are trying harder to get women into gainful employment. Unless something changes, it will not be long before Saudi women are more common in the workplace than Indian ones. Adapted from: www.economist.com 20. According to the statistics given in paragraph B about the fall in female employment in in India ____________. a) 470 m women are now jobless b) only 26% of women are employed c) 235m extra male workers have to be employed 21. It is stated in the text that one of the positive results of the rise in female employment in India would be ____________. a) more Asian women approaching the EU factory workers’ standards b) better means for women to bring up their children c) more women continuing to work after marriage
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22. According to the writer, one of the social trends in India that prevent women from being part of the labour force is that ____________. a) women remaining at home is a sign of higher social position b) women are encouraged by their family to extend their education c) an increasing number of women only accept high-skilled jobs
23. Which one of the following is a factor that leads to a lack of employment opportunities for women? a) Insufficient mechanization b) The growth of the services sector c) A fall in manufacturing
24. The main idea of paragraph H is that ____________. a) if the GDP in India was raised by $550bn, that would provide a boost for the global economy b) an improved status for women at home would solve the problem of low female employment c) even a small increase in men’s contributions to housework would boost the country’s economy
25. The writer is criticizing the optimistic view of the future of female employment because ____________. a) she thinks India is still suffering from high illiteracy and high fertility rates b) Indian girls are not well-educated enough and child brides continue to be a problem c) India is not trying hard enough to get women into employment that will benefit them
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Text V A. Money is a medium of exchange, which has the advantage of eliminating inefficiencies of barter; a unit of account, which facilitates valuation and calculation; and a store of value, which allows economic transactions to be conducted over long periods as well as geographical distances. To perform all these functions optimally, money has to be available, affordable, durable, interchangeable, portable and reliable. Because they fulfil most of these criteria, metals such as gold, silver and bronze were for millennia regarded as the ideal monetary raw material. B. The earliest known coins date back as long ago as 600 BC and were found by archaeologists in the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus (near Izmir in modern-day Turkey). These ovular Lydian coins, which were made of the gold-silver alloy known as electrum and bore the image of a lion’s head, were the forerunners of the Athenian tetradrachm, a standardized silver coin with the head of the goddess Athena on one side and an owl (associated with her for its supposed wisdom) on the other. C. By Roman times, coins were produced in three different metals: the aureus (gold), the denarius (silver) and the sestertius (bronze), ranked in that order according to the relative scarcity of the metals in question, but all bearing the head of the reigning emperor on one side, and the legendary figures of Romulus and Remus on the other. Coins were not unique to the ancient Mediterranean, but they clearly arose there first. It was not until 221 BC that a standardized bronze coin was introduced to China by the ‘first Emperor’, Qin Shihuangdi. In each case, coins made of precious metal were associated with powerful sovereigns who monopolized the minting of money partly to exploit it as a source of revenue. D. The Roman system of coinage outlived the Roman Empire itself. Prices were still being quoted in terms of silver denarii in the time of Charlemagne, king of the Franks from 768 to 814. The difficulty was that by the time Charlemagne was crowned Imperator Augustus in 800, there was a chronic shortage of silver in Western Europe. Demand for money was greater in the much more developed commercial centres of the Islamic Empire that dominated the southern Mediterranean and the Near East, so that precious metal tended to drain away from backward Europe. So rare was the denarius in Charlemagne’s time that twenty-four of them sufficed to buy a Carolingian cow. In some parts of Europe, peppers and squirrel skins served as substitutes for currency; in others pecunia came to mean land rather than money. E. This was a problem that Europeans sought to overcome in one of two ways. They could export labour and goods, exchanging slaves and timber for silver in Baghdad or for African gold in Cordoba and Cairo. Or they could loot precious metal by making war on the Muslim world. The Crusades, like the conquests that followed, were as much about overcoming Europe’s monetary shortage as about converting Muslims to Christianity. F. Crusading was an expensive affair and the net returns were modest. What made their monetary difficulties worse was the failure of medieval and early modern governments to find a solution to what economists have called the big problem of small change: the difficulty of establishing stable relationships between coins made of different kinds of metal. This meant that coins with smaller value were subject to frequent shortages. In the New World where they found plentiful silver (notably Zacatecas in Mexico), the Spanish conquistadors therefore appeared to have broken a centuries-old restriction. 13
G. The initial beneficiary was, of course, Spanish monarchy that had sponsored the conquests. The convoys of ships - up to a hundred at a time - which transported 170 tons of silver a year across the Atlantic, docked at Seville. A fifth of all that was produced was reserved to the crown, accounting for 44 per cent of total royal expenditure at the peak in the late sixteenth century. But the way the money was spent ensured that Spain’s newfound wealth provided the entire continent with a monetary stimulus. The Spanish ‘piece of eight’, which was based on the German thaler (hence, later, the ‘dollar’), became the world’s first truly global currency, financing not only the prolonged wars Spain fought in Europe, but also the rapidly expanding trade of Europe with Asia. H. And yet all the silver of the New World could not bring the rebellious Dutch Republic to heel; could not secure England for the Spanish crown; could not save Spain from an unstoppable economic and imperial decline. Like King Midas, the Spanish monarchs of the sixteenth century, Charles V and Philip II, found that an abundance of precious metal could be as much a curse as a blessing. The reason? They dug up so much silver to pay for their wars of conquest that the metal itself dramatically declined in value - that is to say, in its purchasing power with respect to other goods. During the so-called ‘price revolution’, which affected all of Europe from the 1540s until the 1640s, the cost of food - which had shown no sustained upward trend for three hundred years - rose markedly. In England the cost of living increased by a factor of seven in the same period; not a high rate of inflation these days (on average around 2 per cent per year), but a revolutionary increase in the price of bread by medieval standards. I. What the Spaniards had failed to understand is that the value of precious metal is not absolute. Money is worth only what someone else is willing to give you for it. An increase in its supply will not make a society richer, though it may enrich the government that monopolizes the production of money. Other things being equal, monetary expansion will merely make prices higher. Adapted from: Ferguson,N.(2008). The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. Penguin Press: USA
26. Precious metals were used as monetary raw materials for thousands of years because ____________. a) gold, silver and bronze were the rarest metals that could be acceptable as a medium of exchange b) they facilitated economic transactions over long periods of time and distant places c) the ruling sovereign’s image could be easily imprinted on metal coins
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27. It is understood from the writer’s historical description that the coins used by ancient Mediterranean civilizations ____________. a) consisted of the standardized silver coin with the head of the goddess Athena on one side b) formed the basis of the system of coinage used in Western Europe until the Middle Ages c) followed the model of the Chinese bronze coin introduced by the first Emperor 28. According to the text, Europe suffered from a scarcity of money because ____________. a) economically more developed regions of the Muslim world attracted the precious coins b) the Crusades proved to be too expensive and the Christian Europe ran out of money c) some parts of Europe preferred to return to bargain and used peppers and squirrel skins instead of currency 29. The expression “a centuries-old restriction” in paragraph F refers to the ____________. a) failure of the Crusades to convert the non-Christians b) practice of exchanging goods instead of the use of money c) shortage of precious metal coins used as currency 30. It is stated in the text that in the 16th century the riches of the New World were____________. a) used to pay for the wars that Spain fought b) not integrated into the finances of Europe c) reserved entirely to sponsoring the royal expenditure 31. By the expression “price revolution” the writer describes a century-long period when ____________. a) food prices got into a constantly increasing trend b) the cost of living remained low c) the abundance of silver allowed people to buy a larger variety of goods 32. According to the writer, the lesson the readers have to learn from the Spaniards’ mistakes is that ____________. a) the possession of large amounts of precious metals protects countries from economic decline b) the value of what is used as money is conditional to the demand for it at a particular time c) governments enriched through the production of money also benefit the societies they rule 15
Answer Key 1. c
17. c
2. b
18. c
3. c
19. b
4. b
20. b
5. a
21. b
6. b
22. a
7. c
23. c
8. a
24. c
9. b
25. c
10. b
26. b
11. c
27. b
12. c
28. a
13. a
29. c
14. a
30. a
15. e
31. a
16. b
32. b
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