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Part 1
Read the text and answer questions 1–14.
Read the text below and answer Questions 1—3.
RICE COOKER
If you are a student living on your own, a rice cooker is one of the most practical and convenient kitchen appliances you can buy. It is relatively inexpensive and produces perfect rice every time, ready when you are. You can steam your vegetables while the rice is cooking. Healthy eating has never been easier. There are many different types of rice cookers available. Here are some of the features to look for when purchasing yours.
Desirable Features
Read the reviews and answer Questions 4—8.
RICE COOKER REVIEWS
Rice Cooker A
10-cup, 700 watts, $25.99.
This one takes up a lot of room because it has 2 big steamer racks, It is great when you want to cook your whole meat in the rice cooker. It has a glass lid with a hole and an attached cord but doesn’t show measuring lines.
Rice Cooker B
10-cup, 700 watts, $39.99.
This is a fancy-looking, chrome appliance with a flimsy metal lid. There is a steam hole but no measuring lines. It has a good, stainless steel, steamer tray, which sits at the top of the pan and nests inside for storage. It has a removable cord.
Rice Coooker C
7-cup, 500 watts, $29.99.
This is the smallest one. It has a glass lid with a hole and is a good size for a small family. The only objection is that it doesn’t come with a steamer tray. It has a sturdy, removable cord.
Rice Cooker D
8-cup, 600 watts, $29.99.
This one has a glass lid but no steam hole. It has a sturdy steamer tray which sits on the bottom of the rice cooker pan — less practical than the ones that sit in the top of the cooker. It has a removable cord.
Read the text below and answer Questions 9—14.
HOW DOES A RICE COOKER KNOW WHEN TO TURN ITSELF OFF?
There are a number of appliances that ‘know” when they should turn off. A rice cooker is one of them. The water-heating portion of a drip coffee maker (as opposed to the burner under the pot) is another. Automatic egg boilers work in the same way. All of these appliances use the same principle. If there is water in a heated container and the water is boiling, the container will maintain a constant temperature.
At sea level, the boiling temperature for water is 212 degrees F or 100 degrees C. As soon as all of the liquid water has evaporated (or in the case of the rice cooker, as soon as all of the water is absorbed by the rice), the temperature inside the container immediately rises. There is a thermostat in the appliance. When the thermostat detects that the temperature in the container has risen above 212 degrees F, it turns itself off.
Part 2
Read the text and answer questions 15–27.
Read the text below and answer Questions 15—20.
Unusual jobs
For people who are willing to try less common forms of employment, our job placement service can occasionally offer opportunities. Here are just a few examples:
Ball Picker
Picks up unclaimed baseballs, golf balls and similar items to keep recreation areas clean.
Forest Fire Lookout
This is the perfect job for solitary types with no fear of heights, and the ideal opportunity to write the great American novel! The job consists of manning a tower in a national park or forest reserve and watching for signs of fire. It can be lonely work; for years the Forest Service sought newlywed couples for this job. Pay is based on civil service wage levels and includes generous health benefits.
Furniture Tester
Want to relax for a living? Various companies employ furniture testers to check out their recliners.
Finder
An Oklahoma City man makes a living finding unusual things for people—like a client’s missing brother. Finders Keepers, Inc., was started by an ex-advertising agency employee who discovered he had a knack for finding odd props for TV commercials. Finders Keepers will look for anything, provided it’s legal. The company’s manager boasts a high success rate; however, he’s still looking for an electric clock motor that runs backward!
Egg Breaker
Separates yolks and whites of eggs for use in food products by striking eggs against a bar. Pours contents of broken eggs into an egg-separating device.
Wrinkle Chaser
The person that irons wrinkles from shoes as they are being made to ensure they are perfectly smooth when you buy them.
Chimney Sweep
Sweeps are respected professionals in Europe, with an official uniform—black funeral suits, top hats, and turban. Sweden’s sweeps (both men and women) must serve a 2-year apprenticeship before being licensed to practice. The occupation is almost nonexistent in the U.S., but one company is expanding across different states there.
Weed Farmer
Grows weeds for sale to universities and chemical companies to be used in herbicide research.
Read the text below and answer Questions 21-27
Career Finders
Providers of employment services
We offer a range of services to jobseekers and employers: we find employment and help businesses to find and retain the right staff.
NEW Positions available
A RECEPTIONISTS
FOUR POSITIONS
Location: Vale Park, West Holme, Fentleigh and Holmshurst
In this role you will provide outstanding customer service, administrative support, and reception duties. You will also be responsible for diary management.
B EMPLOYMENT CONSULTANTS
MULTIPLE POSITIONS
In this role you will be responsible for generating employment opportunities for job seekers with local employers, matching jobseeker skills and work choices. You will require a deep understanding of the labour market and a commitment to providing employment solutions to local industries.
C SENIOR WATER QUALITY OFFICER
ONE POSITION
Location: Donniston
You will be the leader of the water quality and treatment team and responsible for all aspects of water and wastewater quality and treatment. You will have wide knowledge and experience in drinking water quality management, water supply and developing systems to control risk. You will have opportunities to interact with a wide range of co-workers and will need to demonstrate substantial ability to build positive relationships and develop a cohesive team.
D WATER SERVICE WORKER
ONE POSITION
Location: Northcote
You will operate, maintain, repair and service waste water systems. You will be a licensed plumber with a high level of trade skills and knowledge, good interpersonal and customer relation skills. For Occupational Health and Safety reasons (safe wearing of breathing apparatus) applicants without facial hair or who agree to become clean- shaven will be preferred.
E GRADUATE PARAMEDICS – AMBULANCE SERVICE
MULTIPLE POSITIONS
Location: Central city area
The City Ambulance Service has positions for full-time graduate paramedics, who have completed their qualifications successfully before commencement. Applicants must have a full driver’s licence, fluent verbal and written English skills, and the required level of medical and physical fitness. It is desirable for applicants to speak and understand another language in addition to English. Selection assesshient includes: medical, physical, psychometric, police check, panel interview and referee reports.
For more information including position descriptions, benefits and selection criteria please visit our website.
Part 3
Read the text and answer questions 28–40.
Clog dancing’s big street revival
A The streets of Newcastle, in the north-east of England, have begun to echo with a sound that has not been heard for about a century. A sharp, rhythmic knocking can be heard among the Saturday crowds in one of the city’s busiest intersections. It sounds a little like dozens of horses galloping along the street, but there are none in sight. In fact, it’s the noise of a hundred people dancing in wooden shoes, or clogs.
The shoppers are about to be ambushed by the UK’s biggest clog dance event. The hundred volunteers have been coached to perform a mass routine. For ten minutes, the dancers bring the city centre to a standstill. There are people clogging on oil drums and between the tables of pavement cafés. A screaming, five-man team cuts through the onlookers and begins leaping over swords that look highly dangerous. Then, as swiftly as they appeared, the cloggers melt back into the crowd, leaving the slightly stunned spectators to go about their business.
B This strange manifestation is the brainchild of conductor Charles Hazlewood, whose conversion to clog dancing came through an encounter with a folk band, The Unthanks. ‘Rachel and Becky Unthank came to develop some ideas in my studio.’ Hazlewood says. ‘Suddenly, they got up and began to mark out the rhythm with their feet — it was an extraordinary blur of shuffles, clicks and clacks that was an entirely new music for me. I thought, ‘Whatever this is. I want more of it”.
Hazlewood was inspired to travel to Newcastle to make a television programme, Come Clog Dancing, in which he and a hundred other people learn to clog in a fortnight. Yet when he first went out recruiting, local people seemed unaware of their heritage. ‘We went out on to the streets, looking for volunteers, but nobody seemed to know anything about clog dancing; or if they did, they thought it originated in the Netherlands.’
C The roots of clog dancing go back several hundred years, and lie in traditional dances of the Dutch, Native Americans and African-Americans, in which the dancer strikes the ground with their heel or toes, to produce a rhythm that’s audible to everyone around. In England, clogging is believed to have first developed in the mid-l9th century in the cotton mills of Lancashire, in the north-west, where workers created a dance that imitated the sound of the machinery. The style quickly spread and developed a number of regional variations. In Northumberland, it became a recreation for miners, who danced solo or to the accompaniment of a fiddle.
‘The Northumberland style is very distinct from Lancashire clogging,’ says Laura Connolly, a virtuoso dancer who worked with Hazlewood on the programme. ‘Northumbrian dancing is quite neat and precise with almost no upper-body movement, whereas the Lancastrian style is more flamboyant.’
D Whatever the region, clogging remains very much a minority pursuit. Yet at the turn of the 20th century, clogging was a fully-fledged youth craze. Two famous comic film actors, Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin, both began their careers as cloggers. But the dance almost completely died out with the passing of the industrial age. ‘People danced in clogs because they were cheap, hardwearing and easily repaired,’ Connolly says. ‘Yet eventually clogs became associated with poverty and people were almost ashamed to wear them.’
E Fortunately, the key steps of the dances were preserved and handed down in a series of little blue books, often named after their inventors. ‘It means that we still know what Mrs Willis’s Rag or Ivy Sands’s Hornpipe were like,’ Connolly says. ‘It’s my dream that one day there’ll be a little blue book called Laura Connolly’s Jig.’
F Her biggest challenge to date was to teach HazLewood and 100 other beginners a routine sufficiently accomplished to perform on television, from scratch, in less than two weeks. ‘I started people off with something simple,’ she says. ‘It’s a basic shuffle that most people can pick up.’ Once Hazlewood had absorbed the basics, Connolly encouraged him to develop a short solo featuring more complex steps — though he nearly came to grief attempting a tricky manoeuvre known as Charlie Chaplin Clicks, so named as it was the signature move of Chaplin’s film character the Little Tramp.
‘To be honest, I never quite got those rights. ‘Hazlewood says with a laugh. ‘We came up with a slightly easier version, which Laura thought we should call Charlie Hazlewood Clicks. The thing about clogs is that they’re all surface: there’s no grip and they’re slightly curved so you stand in a slightly peculiar way. The potential to fall over is enormous.’
On the day, Hazlewood managed to pull off a decent solo, clicks and all. ‘I wasn’t convinced, until the moment I did it, that I was going to get it right,’ he admits. ‘But in the end, clog dancing is not so very different from conducting. Both require you to communicate a beat — only I had to learn how to express it with my feet, rather than my hands. But it’s a good feeling.’
G ‘People forget that clogging was originally a street dance,’ Connolly says. ‘It was competitive, it was popular, and now young people are beginning to rediscover it for themselves. As soon as we finished in Newcastle, I had kids coming up to me saying, “Clog dancing’s cool — I want to do that!”