ENGLISH PLACEMENT TEST – MODEL B

Read text 48. Bram Stoker is best known for his classic horror novel Dracula, which was published in 1897.

Read text 49. Exhausted from her transatlantic flight, Judy could not stay up past 9 p.m.

Read text 50. Juanita rushed to her dance class and burst through the door in the nick of time

Read text 51. Cesar Chavez was an influential leader for farm workers. He fought for their rights and better working conditions. Chavez led many strikes that angered farm owners. Eventually he succeeded in getting increased wages and better living situations for farmworkers.

Read text 52. Television has been introduced to almost every country in the world, reaching a large number of viewers on every continent. About 600 million people saw the first person walk on the moon, and a billion people watched the twentieth Olympic Games. Television has in many ways promoted understanding and cooperation among people. It does this by showing educational and cultural programs.

Read text 53. When cartoonist Charles M. Schulz was a boy in elementary school, other boys teased him for being small and not very good at sports, and his art teacher told him he had no talent for drawing. He had few friends and was too shy to talk to a red-haired girl he admired. Later in life, Schulz used his childhood experiences in his comic strip Peanuts: the strip’s main character, the sad and lonely Charlie Brown, represents Schulz as a little boy. Peanuts was unique at the time because it contained no adult characters. Readers fell in love with Charlie Brown, and Peanuts eventually became one of the most popular comic strips of all time.

Read text 54. Leonardo da Vinci is not only one of the most famous artists in history, but he was also a botanist, a writer, and an inventor. Even though most of his inventions were not actually built in his lifetime, many of today’s modern machines can be traced back to some of his original designs. The parachute, the military tank, the bicycle and even the airplane were foretold in the imaginative drawings that can still be seen in the fragments of da Vinci’s notebooks. Over 500 years ago, this man conceived ideas that were far ahead of his time.

Read text 55. With varying success, many women around the world today struggle for equal rights. Historically, women have achieved greater equality with men during periods of social adversity. The following factors initiated the greatest number of improvements for women: violent revolution, world war, and the rigors of pioneering in an undeveloped land. In all three cases, the essential element that improved the status of women was a shortage of men, which required women to perform many of society’s vital tasks.

Read text 56. The wheel is considered one of the most important mechanical inventions of all time. Many technologies since the invention of the wheel have been based on its principles, and since the industrial revolution, the wheel has been a basic element of nearly every machine constructed by humankind. No one knows the exact time and place of the invention of the wheel, but its beginnings can be seen across many ancient civilizations.

Read text 57. Current thinking on child-rearing advice mirrors historical shifts in theories of development and education. The most disturbing trend in the literature has been a move to deny that parents make any notable contribution to their children’s development. Indeed, according to one highly publicized book, children’s genes, and secondarily their peer groups, not parents, dictate how children turn out. This public declaration of parental weakness comes at a time when many busy parents are poised to retreat from family obligations, and, indeed, it grants them license to do so.

Read text 58. 59. and 60. Ted Serios was not a normal person. He was in his mid-forties when he was introduced to Jule Eisenbud, Professor of Psychiatry at Denver Medical School in 1963. During the next several years, Eisenbud showed that Serios had the bizarre ability to produce images on film by simply staring into a camera. Together, Eisenbud and Serios produced more than two hundred of these "thoughtography." Most of them were images of buildings, landscapes, people, and machines. The thoughtography was created under carefully controlled conditions and the process was observed by many witnesses, some of whom were very skeptical of Serios' claimed abilities. The experimenters were careful to exclude the possibility of fraud by using methods such as medical examinations and X-rays. They even put Serios in a straightjacket and removed all of his clothes. To this date, nobody has been able to arrive at a reasonable explanation for the pictures that Serios and Eisenbud made.