FCE TEST

FCE

Listening. Part 1
You will hear people talking in eight different situations.
For questions 1 – 8, choose the best answer.

1. You hear a young man talking about his hobby of rock climbing. 

How does he feel about it?

2. You hear a public announcement at a family theme park.

What does the announcement contain?

3. You hear two people talking about a course they have attended.

What was the topic of the course?

4. You hear two people talking about a film they have both seen.

What do they agree about?

5. You hear a man being interviewed about a new project he has set up in his home town.

What is the purpose of the project?

6. You hear a man talking on the radio about salespeople.

What does he say about them?

7. You hear two friends talking about a student website.

What do they agree about it?

8. You hear a chef talking about taking part in a cookery competition.

What did he find surprising?

Part 2
You will hear a man called Chris Graham talking to a group of students about a vacation job he had in Australia.
For questions 9 – 18, complete the sentences with a word or short phrase.

My Vacation Job in Australia

9. Chris thinks the best place to find a job like he had is the (?) .

10. Chris is studying (?) at university.

11. For most of the time he was working for the travel company, Chris lived in a (?) outside of the town. 

12. Chris was often asked to go to a (?) at the weekend.

13. In the mornings, Chris had to drive tourists to see the (?) in the desert.

14. Many of the tourists were unaware of the need to keep their (?) covered up when they were in the sun.

15. The tourists particularly wanted to know how to tell the difference between the (?) of the wild animals.

16. In the afternoons, the tourists were able to see some (?) that had more than one use. 

17. Chris says that the local government would like to have a larger (?) to attract tourists.

18. Chris advises other students to send off their job application forms in the month of (?) at the latest. 

Part 3
You will hear five short extracts in which people are talking about happiness. For questions 19 – 23, choose from the list (A – H) what each person says happiness means to them. Use the letters only once. There are three extra letters which you do not need to use.

A Having a happy personality allows you to cope effectively with problems.

B Happiness comes from having someone special to share your thoughts with.

C Happiness is all about the experience of overcoming problems.

D Happiness is a short escape from everyday routine.

E True happiness lies in making others happy.

F Older people are less happy than younger ones.

G Happiness is being thankful for what you have.

H Happiness comes from achieving your goals.

Part 4
You will hear part of a radio interview with an author called Mickey Smith, who is talking about becoming excellent at sport. For questions 24 – 30, choose the best answer (A, B or C).

24. When asked about his theory on talent, Mickey says that

25. Mickey believes that outstanding football players

26. How did Mickey feel when he first became successful at gymnastics?

27. Mickey says that the motivation to continue training for long periods of time

28. Mickey says that coaches working with young people need to understand that

29. Mickey says that many people who play sport don’t bother to try hard because

30. According to Mickey, what can cause some sports people to fail at important events?

Reading. Part 1

For questions 1 – 8, read the text below and decide which answer (A, B, C or D) best fits each gap.

Archaeologists believed that a perfectly preserved 5,500-year-old shoe has been discovered in a cave in Armenia in south-west Asia.

1. It is (?) to be the oldest leather shoe ever found. 

2. The shoe was made of a single piece of leather, stitched at the front and back, and was shaped to fit the wearer’s foot. It had been (?)  with grasses, either for warmth or to make sure it kept its shape.

3. ‘The shoe is relatively small but we can’t say for (?) whether it was worn by a man or a woman,’

4….says Dr Ron Pinhasi, an archaeologist on the research (?)  ‘We thought at first that it was about 600-700 years old because it was in such good shape.’

5. Shoes of this type from later periods have turned (?) in archaeological excavations in various places in Europe,

6….and shoes of a very similar design were still being used on the Aran Islands off the
west coast of Ireland as (?) as the 1950s.

7. It’s (?) a style

8. which (?) …….. popular for thousands of years.

Part 2
For questions 9 – 16, read the text below and think of the word which best fits each gap. Use only one word in each gap.

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.

Part 4
For questions 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.

Example:
A very friendly taxi driver drove us into town.
DRIVEN
We WERE DRIVEN INTO TOWN BY a very friendly taxi driver.

25.Paula can’t wait to hear the band’s new album

FORWARD 

26. Buying a daily newspaper seems pointless to me. 

POINT 

27. Daniel thought the flight would be more expensive than it actually was.

NOT

28. It’s a shame I’m not able to come to your party on Saturday.

COULD

29. There were no trainers left in Denzel’s size anywhere on the website.

SOLD

30. Gwenda deleted her sister’s photographs by accident.

MEAN

Part 5
You are going to read an article about a woman who trains actors in fighting skills. For questions
31 – 36, choose the answer which you think fits best according to the text.

Kombat Kate

James Stanton meets ‘Kombat Kate’ Waters, who trains theatre actors in how to ‘fight’ on stage.

There must be few occasions when it would be really rude to refuse an invitation to head-butt someone you’ve just met! But I’m in one of those right now. I’m in a rehearsal room in a theatre with a group of actors, facing up to stage fighting director Kate Waters. I’ve already dragged her around the room and slapped her on the arm. Now she wants me to head-butt her. But fear not, this is all strictly pretend!
‘Imagine there’s a tin can on my shoulder,’ she says. ‘Now try to knock it off.’ I lower my head as instructed, then lift it sharply, aiming for the imaginary can, hoping desperately that I don’t miscalculate the angle and end up doing damage to her face. To my amazement, I get it right. ‘That was good,’ says Waters. ‘Now maybe try it again without smiling.’
Waters, known in the industry as Kombat Kate, is showing me how actors fight each other without getting hurt, and that includes sword-fighting. (She inspires fierce devotion: when I tweet that I’m meeting Waters, one actress friend responds: ‘She’s amazing. She taught me how to be a secret service agent in two days.’)

Perhaps the most famous play Kate has worked on recently was called Noises Off. She taught the cast how to fall down stairs without breaking any bones. One of the fight scenes is fairly close, Kate tells me, to the one we’re trying out now. ‘I’ve just slowed it down a bit,’ she says tactfully, before inviting me to throw her against the wall. I obey, making sure I let go of her quickly, so she can control her own movement. Push your opponent too hard, and they will hit the wall for real. I watch her hit the wall before falling to the ground. She’s fine, of course. ‘That’s my party trick,’ she says with a grin. ‘Works every time.’
Once the lesson is over Kate tells me how she became one of only two women on the official register of stage fight directors. Already a keen martial arts expert from childhood, Kate did drama at university, and one module of her course introduced her to stage combat. When she made enquiries about the possibility of teaching it as a career, she was told about the register and the qualifications she’d need to be accepted onto it. (line 22) It was no small order: as well as a certificate in advanced stage combat, she would need a black belt in karate and proficiency in fencing, a sport she’d never tried before.
But she rose to the challenge and taught the subject for several years at a drama college before going freelance and becoming a fight advisor for the theatrical world. The play she’s working on is Shakespeare’s Richard III. This involves a famous sword fight. With no instructions left by the great playwright other than – Enter Richard and Richmond: they fight, Richard dies – the style and sequence of the fight is down to Kate and the actors.
‘I try to get as much information as possible about what a fight would have been like in a particular period,’Kate explains. (line 30) ‘But because what I’m eventually doing is telling a dramatic story, not all of it is useful. The scene has to be exciting and do something for the audience.’ Ultimately, of course, a stage fight is all smoke and mirrors. In our lesson, Kate shows me how an actor will stand with his or her back to the audience ahead of a choreographed slap or punch. When the slap comes it makes contact not with skin but with air: the actor whacks his chest or leg to make the sound of the slap.
In the rehearsal room, I can’t resist asking Kate how she thinks she would fare in a real fight. Would she give her attacker a hard time? She laughs, ‘Oh, I’d be awful,’ she says. ‘I only know how to fake it.’ I can’t help thinking, however, that she’s just being rather modest.

31. In the first paragraph, the writer is aware of 

32. How does the writer feel when Kate mentions the tin can?

33. When Kate and the writer repeat the fight scene from Noises Off, we learn that

34. What does the phrase ‘no small order’ (line 22) tell us about stage combat?

35. What does the writer tell us about the sword fight in the play Richard III?

36. What does ‘it’ refer to in line 30?

Part 6
You are going to read a newspaper article about the man who designed the recycling symbol. Six sentences have been removed from the article. Choose from the sentences below the one which fits each gap (37 – 42). There is one extra sentence which you do not need to use.

How the recycling symbol was created
Gary Anderson designed a symbol which we
see everywhere nowadays.

I studied engineering at the University of Southern California at a time when there was a
lot of emphasis in the United States on training young people to be engineers. That said, I eventually switched to architecture. I just couldn’t get a grasp on electronics and architecture seemed more concrete to me.

37. It was around that time that I saw a poster advertising a design competition being run by the Container Corporation of America. The idea was to create a symbol to represent recycled paper. One of my college requirements had been a graphic design course so I thought I’d give it a go. It didn’t take me long to come up with my design: only a day or two.

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But I already had arrows and angles in my mind because on my course I’d done a presentation on recycling waste water. I’d come up with a graphic that described this process very simply.

38. The problem with the design I’d done earlier was that it seemed flat, two-dimensional. So when I sat down to enter the competition, I thought back to a field trip in elementary school to a newspaper office where we’d been shown how paper was fed over rollers as it was printed.
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The three arrows in it look like strips of folded-over paper. I drew them in pencil, and then traced over everything in black ink. These days, with computer graphics packages, it’s rare that designs are quite so plain.

39. I think I found out I’d won the competition in a letter. Was I excited? Well, yes of course – but
not that excited.

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So it just seemed like, of course I would win! There was a monetary prize, though for the life of me I can’t remember how much it was… about $2,000?

40. When I finished my studies, I decided to go into urban planning and I moved to Los Angeles. It seems funny, but I really played down the fact that I’d won this competition. I was afraid it would make me look as though I was interested
in graphics, rather than urban planning.
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I remember seeing it once on a leaflet which had been produced on recycled paper, but then it disappeared.

41. A while after graduating, I flew to Amsterdam for a holiday. I’ll never forget: when I walked off the plane, I saw my symbol. It was on a big recycling bin. And it was bigger than a beach ball!

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I was really taken aback. That was quite a long time ago though. Since then, I’ve got more qualifications and worked for quite a few different firms, some more environmentally aware than others.

42. I feel much prouder of the recycling symbol now than I used to, probably because it’s so widely seen. Maybe this design has been more important to me than I’d thought.

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There’s more to me than the recycling symbol.

Part 7
You are going to read part of the autobiography of a surfing instructor. For questions 43 – 52, write a letter from the sections (A – E).

The sections may be chosen more than once.