W: Very good, Mr….
M: Barry. Walter Barry from LCP in London.
W: Right, Mr. Barry. We look forward to hearing from you.
M: Thank you. Goodbye.
W: Bye.
Questions 8 to 11 are based on the conversation you have just heard.
8. What do we learn about the woman’s company?
9. What do we learn about the man?
10. What is the woman’s position in her company?
11. What does the woman suggest the man do?
Conversation Two
M: You’re going to wear out the computer’s keyboard!
W: Oh, hi.
M: Do you have any idea what time it is?
W: About ten or ten-thirty?
M: It’s nearly midnight.
W: Really? I didn’t know it was so late.
M: Don’t you have an early class to teach tomorrow morning?
W: Yes, at seven o’clock. My commuter class, the students who go to work right after their lesson.
M: Then you ought to go to bed. What are you writing, anyway?
W: An article I hope I can sell.
M: Oh, another of your newspaper pieces? What’s this one about?
W: Do you remember the trip I took last month?
M: The one up to the Amazon?
W: Well, that’s what I’m writing about—the new highway and the changes it’s making in the Amazon valley.
M: It should be interesting.
W: It is. I guess that’s why I forgot all about the time.
M: How many articles have you sold now?
W: About a dozen so far.
M: What kind of newspapers buy them?
W: The papers that carry a lot of foreign news. They usually appear in the big Sunday editions where they need a lot of background stories to help fill up the space between the ads.
M: Is there any future in it?
W: I hope so. There’s a chance I may sell this article to a news service.
M: Then your story would be published in several papers, wouldn’t it?
W: That’s the idea. And I might even be able to do other stories on a regular basis.
M: That would be great.
Questions 12 to 15 are based on the conversation you have just heard.
12. What is the woman’s occupation?
13. What is the woman writing about?
14. Where do the woman’s articles usually appear?
15. What does the woman expect?
Section C
Directions: In this section, you will hear three passages. At the end of each passage, you will hear some questions. Both the passage and the questions will be spoken only once. After you hear a question, you must choose the best answer from the four choices marked A), B), C) and D). Then mark the corresponding letter on Answer Sheet 1 with a single line through the centre.
Passage One
In today’s class, we’ll discuss Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. As I’m sure you all know, Morrison is both a popular and a highly respected author, and it’s not easy to be both. Born in 1931, Morrison has written some of the most touching and intelligent works on the African-American experience ever written by anyone, and yet to call her an “African-American writer” doesn’t seem to do her justice. In many ways, she’s simply an American writer—and certainly one of our best.
Beloved is a truly remarkable work. It was recommended for nearly every major literary prize, including the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and it in fact won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988. Morrison herself is distinguished for having won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993.
What makes Beloved unique is the skillful, sure way in which Morrison blends intensely personal storytelling and American history, racial themes and gender themes, the experience of Blacks with the experience of all people everywhere, the down-to-earth reality of slavery with a sense of mysterious spirituality.
We’ll be paying special attention to these themes as we discuss this work. I’m particularly interested in your views on the relative importance of race and gender in this book. Is it more important that Sethe, the main character, is black or that she’s a woman? Which contributes more to her being? What does Morrison tell us about both?
Questions 16 to 18 are based on the passage you have just heard.
16. What do we learn about Toni Morrison?
17. What honor did Toni Morrison receive in 1993?
18. What does the speaker tell us about Sethe, the main character in Morrison’s novel Beloved?
Passage Two
The topic of my talk today is gift-giving. Everybody likes to receive gifts, right? So you may think that gift-giving is a universal custom. But actually, the rules of gift-giving vary quite a lot, and not knowing them can result in great