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Paul Sparks,
Sino-Canadian International College, Guangxi University, Online English Lesson Plans, Lesson Material and Ideas
for Semester 2 Reading Lessons...
Chinese
Name:___________________
English
Name:___________________
Class:______
Student No:________
Instructions:
Answer all questions in pen, using the space provided.
Question 1 (The Main Idea):
Read the following news article
then write the main idea of the article, in your own words, using the
space provided: (worth 10 marks)
"Friends Too
Sexy For China"
Friends
is causing controversy in China because the characters talk about sex
too much.
Qin
Mingxin, deputy director of the international department at China
Central Television said: "I had thought the play focused on
friendship.
"In
many of the episodes, a man would meet a woman and immediately go to
bed with her. This is not good according to Chinese people.
"The
attitudes portrayed in the show cannot be generally accepted by
Chinese audiences."
Bosses
at the channel had considered cutting episodes which they considered
to have an especially high sexual content.
But
as many of the show's viewers had already seen the programmes on DVD
they thought it would disappoint these people to cut them.
CCTV
officials are in talks with Warner Brothers, the makers of Friends, to
find a solution to the problem.
Question
2 (Conjunctions):
There are seven words which we call
“coordinating conjunctions”. Five of the coordinating conjunctions
are given below. In the two spaces write the other two words that can
be used as coordinating conjunctions: (4 marks each)
·
or
·
yet
·
for
·
nor
·
so
·
__________
·
__________
Question
3 (Fact & Opinion):
Read the following article then make a
list of five facts in the space provided.
(3 marks each)
“More
Jobseekers Finding Work Online”
One
in 10 people have found a new job via the internet despite concerns
over a lack of human response and technical problems, according to a
report.
More
than 1.3 million people have been recruited over the web in the past
five years and that figure is set to increase, research shows.
A
poll of 1,600 people by recruitment firm reed.co.uk showed that most
people praised the speed, ease of use and availability of the Internet
in searching for work.
Concerns
included lack of personal feedback, not enough relevant jobs, and
technical problems.
"Our
research shows that almost everyone thinks internet recruitment is
going to get more important in the future, as technological
improvements make it an even faster and easier route to the right
job," said Dan Ferrandino, director of reed.co.uk.
Question 4 (Compound Words):
Read the following article then underline
all of the compound words that use either closed form or hyphenated
form: (total of 10 marks)
“M&S
Celebrates 21 Years Of Ready-Made Sweet And Sour”
Marks
& Spencer is celebrating 21 years since launching what it claims
was the first range of Chinese ready-made meals in the UK.
The
retailer brought the taste of the Orient to shoppers in 1983 with
products such as sweet and sour pork, spare ribs, Chinese-style chow
mein and egg fried rice.
The
first dedicated Chinese ready-meal factory was built for M&S in
Nottingham a year later.
Since
1983, the range has grown to more than 50 products. M&S says it
now sells more than 13 million ready-made Chinese meals a year -
enough to span the length of the Great Wall of China over 1,000 times.
Helena
Fleming, the chain's oriental product developer, said: "We've
taken our customers' taste buds on a real 'Orient Express' over the
last 21 years - bringing them exotic ingredients.
"In
the early days we sourced water chestnuts from Hong Kong and black
bean sauce from Singapore.
"Today
we use green tea leaves from the Jiangxi region in China, Shaoxing
rice wine from the Zhejiang region and pickled chilli paste from
chillies grown in Sichuan."
M&S
is marking the 21st anniversary by launching a new range of dishes to
coincide with the Chinese New Year tomorrow.
Question 5 (Abbreviations)
: The following abbreviations are used in
job adverts. Write the full meaning for each: (3 marks each)
·
FT - ___________________________________________
·
20 hrs - ________________________________________
·
am/pm -
_______________________________________
·
eves - _________________________________________
·
No exp req - _____________________________________
Question 6 (Abbreviations)
: The following abbreviations are used in
business. Underline the correct meaning: (2 marks each)
R.S.V.P.
a.
as soon as possible
b.
please reply
c.
per week
d.
value added tax
e.
paid
E.T.A.
a.
thanks
b.
for the attention of
c.
estimated time of arrival
d.
quantity
e.
with reference to
re
a.
as soon as possible
b.
please reply
c.
please
d.
quantity
e.
with reference to
mth
a.
public limited company
b.
I owe you
c.
pound (weight)
d.
junior
e.
month
N/A
a.
not applicable
b.
I owe you
c.
pound (weight)
d.
junior
e.
month
Question
7 (Homonyms): Select the correct answer
for each homonym or confusable words: (2 marks each)
a.
I couldn't tell _______________ she was serious or not. (whether /
weather)
b.
___________ are too many possible answers to this question. (They're /
There / Their)
c.
_________ going to help me with this? (Whose / Who's)
d.
I'm afraid she's going to _____________ her grandmother's wedding
band. (loose / lose)
e.
She has apparently found it difficult to ___________ the
circumstances. (accept / except)
Question
8 (Speed Reading & Comprehension):
Read the following essay then answer the
questions that follow:
“Soccer:
Why It Can't Make the Big Time in the U.S.A.”
by
Dewey Cheatham
Source:
http://ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/composition/cause_effect.htm
Soccer
- or football (or foosball or futbol), as it is called by the rest of
the world outside the United States - is surely the most popular sport
in the world. Every four years, the world championship of soccer, the
World Cup, is watched by literally billions all over the world,
beating out the United States professional football's Superbowl by
far. It is estimated that 1.7 billion television viewers watched the
World Cup final between France and Brazil in July of 1998. And it is
also a genuine world championship, involving teams from 32 countries
in the final rounds, unlike the much more parochial and misnamed World
Series in American baseball (that doesn't even involve Japan or Cuba,
two baseball hotbeds). But although soccer has become an important
sport in the American sports scene, it will never make inroads into
the hearts and markets of American sports the way that football,
basketball, hockey, baseball, and even tennis and golf have done.
There are many reasons for this.
Recently
the New England Revolution beat the Tampa Bay Mutiny in a game played
during a horrid rainstorm. Nearly 5000 fans showed up, which shows
that soccer is, indeed, popular in the United States. However, the
story of the game was buried near the back of the newspaper's sports
section, and there was certainly no television coverage. In fact, the
biggest reason for soccer's failure as a mass appeal sport in the
United States is that it doesn't conform easily to the demands of
television. Basketball succeeds enormously in America because it
regularly schedules what it calls "television time-outs" as
well as the time-outs that the teams themselves call to re-group, not
to mention half-times and, on the professional level, quarter breaks.
Those time-outs in the action are ideally made for television
commercials. And television coverage is the lifeblood of American
sports. College basketball lives for a game scheduled on CBS or ESPN
(highly recruited high school players are more likely to go to a team
that regularly gets national television exposure), and we could even
say that television coverage has dictated the pace and feel of
American football. Anyone who has attended a live football game knows
how commercial time-outs slow the game and sometimes, at its most
exciting moments, disrupt the flow of events. There is no serious
objection, however, because without television, football knows that it
simply wouldn't remain in the homes and hearts of Americans. Also,
without those advertising dollars, the teams couldn't afford the
sky-high salaries of their high-priced superstars.
Soccer,
on the other hand, except for its half-time break, has no time-outs;
except for half-time, it is constant run, run, run, run, back and
forth, back and forth, relentlessly, with only a few seconds of
relaxation when a goal is scored, and that can happen seldom,
sometimes never. The best that commercial television coverage can hope
for is an injury time-out, and in soccer that happens only with
decapitation or disembowelment.
Second,
Americans love their violence, and soccer doesn't deliver on this
score the way that American football and hockey do. There are brief
moments, spurts of violence, yes, but fans can't expect the full-time
menu of bone-crushing carnage that American football and hockey can
deliver minute after minute, game after game. In soccer, players are
actually singled out and warned - shamed, with embarrassingly silly
"yellow cards," for acts of violence and duplicity that
would be smiled at in most American sports other than tennis and golf.
Third,
it is just too difficult to score in soccer. America loves its
football games with scores like 49 to 35 and a professional basketball
game with scores below 100 is regarded as a defensive bore. In soccer,
on the other hand, scores like 2 to 1, even 1 to 0, are commonplace
and apparently desirable; games scoreless at the end of regulation
time happen all the time. (In the 515 games played in the final phase
in the history of the World Cup games through 1994, only 1584 goals
have been scored. That's three a game!) And if there is no resolution
at the end of overtime, the teams resort to a shoot-out that has more
to do with luck than with real soccer skills. Worse yet, it is
possible for a team to dominate in terms of sheer talent and
"shots-on-goal" and still lose the game by virtue of a
momentary lapse in defensive attention, a stroke of bad luck, and the
opponent's break-away goal. Things like that can happen, too, in
baseball, but the problem somehow evens out over baseball's very long
season of daily games. In soccer, it just isn't fair. Soccer
authorities should consider making the goal smaller and doing away
with the goalie to make scoring easier. And the business of starting
over after each goal, in the middle of the field, has to be
reconsidered. It's too much like the center-jump after each goal in
the basketball game of yesteryear.
It
seems unlikely that Americans will ever fully comprehend or appreciate
a sport in which players are not allowed to use their arms and hands.
Although the footwork of soccer players is a magnificent skill to
behold, most American fans are perplexed by straitjacketed soccer
players' inability and unwillingness to "pick up the darn ball
and run with it!" The inability to use substitutes (unless the
player to be substituted for is lying dead or maimed on the field of
play) is also bewildering to Americans, who glorify the "sixth
man" in basketball and a baseball game in which virtually the
entire roster (including an otherwise unemployable old man called
"the designated hitter") is deployed on the field at one
time or another.
Finally,
the field in soccer is enormous. Considerably larger than the American
football field, the soccer field could contain at least a dozen
basketball courts. Americans like their action condensed, in a small
field of vision - ten enormous sweaty people bouncing off one another
and moving rapidly through a space the size of a medium-sized bedroom,
twenty-two even larger people in bulky uniforms converging on a small,
oddly shaped ball. In soccer, on the other hand, there is a premium on
"spreading out," not infringing upon the force field
occupied by a team-mate, so that fancy foot-passing is possible. This
spreading out across the vast meadow of the soccer playing field does
not lend itself, again, to close get-down-and-dirty television
scrutiny.
Soccer
is a great sport and it certainly deserves the increased attention and
popularity it is getting on all levels. But - primarily, again,
because it does not lend itself to television - it will never make it
big in the United States the way these other sports have, not until it
changes some of its fundamental strategies.
List
three facts from the essay: (2 marks each)
List
three opinions from the essay: (2 marks each)
What is the main
idea of the essay?: (10 marks)
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