Test Unit 1 11th Grade Highlands

You will hear five short extracts in which people are talking about happiness. For questions 1 – 5, 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.

For questions 6 - 17, read the text below and decide which answer best fits each gap. LOST PROPERTY            Have you lost anything on public transport? An umbrella, perhaps, or a pair of gloves? Your (6)_____ teeth, a lawnmower, a wedding dress or maybe your favourite park bench? All of these and many other unusual items have been (7)_____ and handed in to London’s lost property office in Baker Street over the (8)_____ 75 years. If you go to their office you will be amazed at the enormous number of things people (9)_____ while travelling in the city on buses, trains and the underground. Last year 36,852 books were found; that’s enough to fill a library! 28,550 bags were handed in, with things in them, and 27,174 (10)_____ of clothing. The manager of the lost property office says she loves being reminded how (11)_____ Londoners are when they hand in lost property. Of course not everything gets handed in, but stories (12)_____ the time a bag was handed in with 10,000 pounds in it help restore your faith in human nature.           The office is quite (13)_____ at getting things back to their owners too. If you lose something you can (14)_____ it to the lost property office and assuming someone has kindly handed it in, their computer system Sherlock will try to find it for you. The office (15)_____ you to give as much information as possible as this obviously makes the search (16)_____. However, if you lose something and it finds its way to the lost property office they won’t (17)_____ it forever. If they are not claimed after three months, most items are given to charity or sold at auction.

You are going to read an article about celebrity assistants. For questions 18-24, choose the answer which you think fits best according to the text. ASSISTANTS TO THE STARS         It stands to reason that a city like Los Angeles, which is home to so many of the famous and the semi-famous, would have an Association of Celebrity Personal Assistants (ACPA). The organisation describes personal assistants as 'multitasking', as 'possessing the most resourceful, creative, insightful, and results-driven abilities.'       When I first got in touch with Josef Csongei, the organisation's president, he was initially reluctant to talk to me because I was a journalist. As he sees it, celebrity personal assistants have not always been treated fairly by the press. But despite this, and all the hard work and lack of appreciation that can come with this line of work, he explained, the jobs were still widely sought after. He noted that people regularly travelled great distances to attend a seminar titled 'Becoming a Celebrity Personal Assistant', run by the ACPA. To prove his point, he told me about Dean Johnson. In the coming weeks, I heard this story from a number of assistants, including Johnson himself, and every time it left me baffled.         The story begins one night in September 1994, with Dean Johnson sitting at home in Columbia, South Carolina. Johnson is a single, 32-year-old business executive in charge of marketing and advertising at a sizeable company in the healthcare industry. It is 11 pm and he's looking to unwind in front of the television after a long day's work. A repeat of a talk show appears on the screen, and the host introduces her four guests: the celebrity personal assistants for Whoopi Goldberg, Roseanne Barr, Burt Reynolds and Carol Burnett. As these assistants talk about flying on private jets and attending Hollywood parties, Johnson reaches for a pen and starts taking notes. Without wasting another minute, he picks up the phone, calls directory enquiries in Los Angeles, and asks for the home phone numbers of the four assistants on the show.         Only one of them is listed: Ron Holder, who works for Whoopi Goldberg. Johnson dials his number, and a minute later Holder picks up the phone. “He said I was very lucky to get through,” Johnson told me. “Apparently, in the three months since he had appeared on that talk show, he had received about 200 phone calls from people like me. He was in the process of disconnecting his phone, but he was nice enough to chat with me for a while.” During their conversation, Holder told Johnson that he should consider attending the 'Becoming a Celebrity Personal Assistant' seminar in Los Angeles.         For someone like Johnson, with almost no connections in the industry, the notion of moving out to Los Angeles to become a celebrity personal assistant, something he did two months later, was extremely courageous - there's no denying that. The typical American story of the guy in the remote provinces who falls in love with the glamour of the silver screen, packs up all his possessions and moves out to Hollywood to become a star is almost a century old. But Johnson's story offered a new twist: he moved out to Hollywood to become an assistant to a star.         Of the thousands of people who work in Hollywood: agents, lawyers, stylists, publicists, business managers and others, many hope to rub shoulders with the biggest stars. What's unique about celebrity personal assistants is that such proximity appears to be the only perk their profession offers. Most describe the bulk of their work as drudgery: doing laundry, fetching groceries, paying bills. Assistants typically make about $56,000 a year -hardly a fortune by Hollywood standards, especially given the round-the-clock obligations they often have. What's more, the job is rarely a stepping stone to fame: celebrity personal assistants are, on average, aged about 38, right in the middle of their professional lives, and most of the ones I met described their line of work as a lifelong profession. For them, being an assistant was not the means to an end but an end in itself.

For questions 25 - 35 choose the alternative that BEST fits each gap.

For questions 36 - 48 fill in the blanks with the adjectives in brackets. Remember to add THE or THAN when necessary.

Speaker 1: [Blank]

Speaker 2: [Blank]

Speaker 3: [Blank]

Speaker 4: [Blank]

Speaker 5: [Blank]

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When the writer first contacted him, Josef Csongei was

The phrase 'to prove his point' (paragraph 2) refers to Csongei's belief that celebrity assistants

At the beginning of the story about Dean Johnson, we learn that

What was Dean's immediate reaction to what he saw on the programme?

How did Ron Holder respond to Dean's phone call?

In the fifth paragraph, the writer suggests that Dean Johnson

In the final paragraph, we learn that celebrity assistants

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