Advanced English Language Skills /

English Language Framework Level 5

Summer 2019

Written Examination
This paper contains sections on Language in Use, Reading and
Writing.

You may complete the sections in any order.

Time: 2 hours 15 minutes

The maximum mark for this paper is 100.

Any reference material brought into the examination room must be

handed to the invigilator before the start of the examination.

All answers must be written in the answer booklet provided. Do NOT

write on this paper.
 Section A – Language in Use
Answer ALL questions

Marks
Question 1
Grammar - get

Write a word which has the same meaning as get in the sentences.

Example:
I am looking for a shop where I can get a book.
buy

a) Could you get your sister to help me with my homework? 1

b) You’re going to get found out if you’re not careful. If you want the party to be a 1
surprise, you can’t tell too many people.

c) I am trying to get him to come with me. He would have a great time, but he 1
doesn’t want to come.

d) Can you get me my phone, please? I’ve left it over on that table and I can’t walk 1
with my bad foot.

e) I get more money in my new job than I did in my old one, so I am happy about 1
that.

f) The police have been trying to get the criminal for months, but they don’t have 1
any leads.

Total 6 Marks

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 Marks
Question 2
Vocabulary – idioms to describe personality

Complete each sentence by adding ONE word to each gap. The first letter is given.

Example:
Their mother sometimes seems angry, but really she’s got a heart of g________.
Their mother sometimes seems angry, but really she’s got a heart of gold.

a) Although David got an important job in a big company, he’s still very down to 1
e_______. He doesn’t get carried away and hasn’t changed at all.

b) Jack seemed quite ordinary. He just came into the office every day and got on 1
with his work. But he turned out to be a bit of a dark h_______. We found out he
was in a rock band who played concerts all over the world.

c) Katrina is quite l______-back. She never gets stressed or angry about anything. 1

d) The party was boring until George turned up and then it was great. He’s always 1
the life and s______ of any party.

e) We want Antonio to work in a different department, but he won’t change. He’s 1

very s_________ in his ways.

f) Martina is really unpredictable. We never know what she is going to say in 1

meetings. She ‘s a bit of a loose c_________.

Total 6 Marks

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 Marks
Question 3
Grammar - Pronouns

There are two pronouns in each sentence. Write ‘1’ if the first one is correct, ‘2’ if
the second is correct, or ‘both’ if both are correct.

Example:
1. They 2. One say that we should eat five portions or vegetables each day.
1 (‘They’ is correct. ‘One’ is incorrect)

a) You didn’t forget your jacket. It’s on the chair behind 1. you 2. yourself. 1

b) My two children helped 1. themselves 2. each other with their homework. 1

c) Either Mr Jones or Mrs Fisher left 1. his 2. their teacher’s book in the classroom. 1
I will take it to the teachers’ office.

d) 1. You 2. One shouldn’t speak on the phone in a cinema. 1

e) I’d like you to talk to 1. each other 2. one another and share some ideas about 1
the project.

f) Jackie is quite modest and doesn’t talk about 1. her 2. herself very much, even 1
though she has been very successful in business.

Total 6 Marks

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 Marks
Question 4
Vocabulary - jobs

Complete each sentence with ONE word from the box below. You will not need all
the words.

career experience part qualifications job

permanent fixed full unpaid position

Example:
I’ve applied for a higher in my department, but I don’t think I will get it.
I’ve applied for a higher position in my department, but I don’t think I will get it.

a) After working at the same level for five years, I think it’s time for me to take a step 1
up the ________ ladder.

b) I volunteered as an intern in a local company. I don’t mind doing _______ work, 1

and I am sure it will benefit me in the future.

c) I’m only working _______-time because I just work three days a week at the 1
moment.

d) I am currently on a __________-term contract for six months. After that I don’t 1

know what will happen to me. This is not a very secure industry.

e) I’ve been working here for two years, but I’m a bit bored now so I think it’s time to 1
start _______-hunting again.

f) I got some work _________ during my last summer holidays which will hopefully 1
attract interest from employers.

Total 6 Marks

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 Marks
Question 5
Grammar - tenses

There are two verb forms in each sentence. Write ‘1’ if the first one is correct, ‘2’ if
the second is correct, or ‘both’ if both are correct.

Example:
When I was a child I 1. would play 2. used to play outside every day.
both (‘would play’ and ‘used to play’ are both correct.)

a) When my sister was younger she 1.would look 2. used to look like my mother, 1
but she doesn’t now.

b) Last week I 1. bought 2. used to buy a new car. 1

c) When I woke up in the morning, I noticed that it 1. had rained 2. was raining in 1
the night because the streets were still wet.

d) At school, I 1. would always get 2. was always getting into trouble with my 1
teachers for not doing my homework.

e) I 1. used to live 2. would live in Spain but I decided I wanted a change so I 1

moved to Portugal.

f) I 1. had read 2. had been reading a book before I fell asleep. It was really 1
interesting and I wanted to finish it but I was just too tired so I will have to finish it
later.

Total 6 Marks

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 Marks
Question 6
Vocabulary - money

Complete each sentence by adding ONE word to each gap. The first letter is given.

Example:
We can’t stay in an expensive hotel on holiday because we will have a limited b______.
We can’t stay in an expensive hotel on holiday because we will have a limited
budget.

a) I’d love to get a car, but I can’t a_______ one at the moment so I will have to 1
continue to use the bus.

b) I could take a loan from the bank but I don’t want to get into d______ so I will try 1
and manage without.

c) We haven’t paid the full cost of the hotel room yet, but we have paid a d_______ 1
to cover any possible damages.

d) My sister needs to call the bank to check her b________ before she withdraws 1
any cash.

e) You can pay by credit card but there is a transaction f_______ of 2%, so the final 1
cost will be higher.

f) You don’t have to give me the money in cash, you can just t________ it from 1
your bank account to mine.

Total 6 Marks

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 Marks
Question 7
Grammar - wish

Put the verbs in brackets in the correct tense.

Example:
I wish I _______ (have) a better job – that way I would earn more money.
I wish I had a better job – that way I would earn more money.

a) I wish I ________ (study) hard for my exams. Unfortunately I was too lazy and I 1
failed them all.

b) Julia wishes she ________ (can) travel more but she doesn’t get any holidays. 1

c) I wish I ________ (buy) the tickets last week when they were cheaper. 1

d) I am going to France next week. I wish I _______ (speak) French, but 1

unfortunately I can’t.

e) Veronica wishes she ________ (save) more money when she was younger 1
instead of wasting it all.

f) I wish we _______ (not paint) the living room yellow. I don’t like it and now I want 1
to change it.

Total 6 Marks

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Question 8
Vocabulary - telephones

Complete each sentence by adding ONE word to each gap. The first letter is given.

Example:
I don’t have a l_________ so you’ll have to call me on my mobile.
I don’t have a landline so you’ll have to call me on my mobile.

a) I keep trying to call Frank but his line is always e________. I don’t know who he 1
has been talking to for so long.

b) I left my phone at home, and when I got back I saw that I had ten m________ 1
calls, so I had to call everyone back.

c) I’m afraid I can’t hear you very well because I have a weak s________ here. Let 1
me try and move closer to the window to see if that helps.

d) I need to find somewhere to c______ my phone because my battery has almost 1

finished.

e) I was in the middle of a call when we got c_______ off. I’m not sure what 1
happened. She called me back and it was fine.

f) I’ve been calling the bank all day but I can’t g________ through. They need to 1
employ more people to answer the phones.

Total 6 Marks

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 Marks
Question 9
Grammar – future perfect and future continuous tenses

Put the verbs in brackets into the future perfect or future continuous tense

Example:
I hope that we _____________ (find) a solution to this problem before the manager arrives
tomorrow.
I hope that we will have found a solution to this problem before the manager arrives
tomorrow.

a) If we win next week’s game, we ___________ (beat) them five times in a row. 1

b) Don’t call me at 8 o’clock because I __________ (have) dinner then. Call at 9 1

when I will be free.

c) I _____________ (meet) Elisa on Wednesday so I will be able to ask her for the 1
latest sales figures.

d) Please don’t leave that cake there or else I _____________ (eat) it all when you 1
come back later. Take it with you.

e) If you want to find me later, I ___________ (watch) TV in my room so just come 1

up.

f) I promise that I _____________ (finish) this project by the time you come back 1
from the conference.

Total 6 Marks

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 Marks
Question 10
Grammar – prepositions

Complete each sentence with ONE preposition.

Example:
Marcus insisted _____ staying until the end of the movie, even though he didn’t like it.
Marcus insisted on staying until the end of the movie, even though he didn’t like it.

a) You need to learn how to deal ______ criticism if you want to be a journalist. 1

b) I’m not aware _____ any issues with the trains so I am not sure why he is late. 1

c) He blamed me _____ the drop in sales figures, but in my area they actually 1
increased.

d) He needed to borrow some money _____ the bank to keep his company in 1
business.

e) She’s good _____ tennis. In fact, she won a competition last week. 1

f) You have so much going for you. There really is nothing for you to be angry 1
_____.

Total 6 Marks

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Advanced English Language Skills / ELF Level 5 © NCC Education Limited 2019
 Section B – Reading
Answer ALL questions

Case Study 1
Transmitting wireless data

Read the text and answer the questions below.

The word “smart” is everywhere these days. If you believe the hype, smart farms will all employ
sensors to report soil conditions, crop growth or the health of animals. Smart cities will monitor the
levels of pollution and noise on every street corner. And smart goods in warehouses will tell robots
where to store them, and how. Getting this to work, however, requires figuring out how to get
thousands of sensors to transmit data reliably across hundreds of metres. At a recent conference in
Miami, Shyam Gollakota and his colleagues from the University of Washington revealed a gadget
that can do exactly that - and with only a fraction of the power required by the best devices currently
available.

Dr Gollakota’s invention uses a technology called “LoRa” (from “long range”). Like Wi-Fi, this allows
computers to communicate with radio waves. Unlike Wi-Fi, though, LoRa is not easily blocked by
walls, furniture and other obstacles. That is partly because LoRa uses lower-frequency radio waves
than Wi-Fi (900MHz rather than 2.4GHz). Such waves pass through objects more easily. More
importantly, LoRa devices make use of a technique called “chirp spread modulation”. That means
the frequency of the carrier wave is deliberately deformed in order to carry data in order to rise and
fall in a regular fluctuating pattern. That makes even faint LoRa signals easy to distinguish from
background noise, which fluctuates randomly.

Generating that carrier wave requires a lot of power. But modulating it, in order to put data on it, can
be done by a chip that consumes almost no power at all. Conventional LoRa transmitters do both
jobs. Dr Gollakota proposes to separate them.

In his version of the system, a central transmitter broadcasts the carrier wave, while the task of
adding the data is done by a chip on the sensor. It accomplishes that by connecting its tiny aerial
with the ground, or not doing so, millions of times every second. When the aerial is connected with
the ground, part of the carrier wave will be absorbed. When it is not, it will be reflected. The chip can
relay this data back to a receiver with the whole process controlled by three tiny electronic switches.

Dr Gollakota believes that such chips can be made for less than 20 cents apiece. The signals they
generate can be detected at ranges of hundreds of metres. Yet with a power consumption of just 20
millionths of a watt, a standard watch battery should keep them going a decade or more. In fact, it
might be possible to power them from the air: Dr Gollakota and his colleagues have experimented
with running the chips from the electricity generated when light strikes a small reflector.

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 Marks
6

The researchers are keeping quiet about the orders they have received. But early applications could
be medical. The team have incorporated the chips into contact lenses and a skin patch. In hospitals,
the chips could help track everything from patient beds to syringes and stethoscopes. The devices
are also in the process of making their way into disposable drug-delivery devices that notify patients
via their phones when their medication is running low. That seems like a smart start.

(Adapted from The Economist, 16th September 2017)

Question 1

Match the numbers of paragraphs 1 to 6 with the headings (a) to (h) below. You will not
need TWO (2) headings.

a) Cheap to manufacture and operate.

b) Why Dr Gollakota’s device improves on existing LoRa devices.

c) Dr Gollakota’s long-term plans for the device.

d) Why LoRa works better than Wi-Fi

e) What is needed before the promises come true

f) Early, practical uses.

g) The materials used in making LoRa transmitters.

h) How Dr Gollakota’s device adds data to the wave.

Total 6 Marks

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 Marks
Question 2

Read the following sentences and write true if the view is expressed in the text, false if the
opposite view is expressed in the text and not given if the information is not given in the
text.

a) Currently available data transmitting devices require more power than Dr 1

Gollakota’s device.

b) Dr Gollakota had previously worked with Wi-Fi transmitting devices. 1

c) In Dr Gollakota’s system, a central transmitter adds data to a wave. 1

d) Dr Gollakota’s chips do not require powerful batteries. 1

e) One use of the devices is to monitor patient medication supply levels. 1

Total 5 Marks

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Case Study 2
Classifying planets

Read the text and answer the question below.

A classification of planets is quickly being produced. Recently, a group of researchers in the United
States divided planets smaller than Neptune into two classes, based on both their current
composition and a presumption about how they formed. Another group of astronomers, led by
Vardan Adibekyan in Portugal have performed a similar task with gas giants, the largest type of
planet, which are represented in the solar system by Jupiter and Saturn.

The team’s work suggests gas giants come in two types, with intermediate forms being rare. The
smaller type have a mass up to four times that of Jupiter. The larger have between ten and 20 times
Jupiter’s mass. Jupiter, chosen as a reference because it is the solar system’s largest planet, has
320 times the mass of Earth.

Using a database of information on planets orbiting stars other than the sun, Dr Adibekyan and his
colleagues found gas giants of the smaller class circling about 170 stars, and of the larger one going
around 100 stars. Crucially, a star seemed to host either one sort or the other. Stars with both were
rare. This suggested to Dr Adibekyan that something about a star, or about the circumstances of its
formation, affects the types of planet that form from the cloud surrounding it.

One way stars routinely differ from each other is in the amount of metal they contain. An astronomer’s
definition of a metal is different from a chemist’s. An astronomical metal is any element other than
hydrogen or helium. Dr Adibekyan and his colleagues found that stars orbited by small gas giants
were almost always metal-rich. Conversely, those orbited by large giants were lower in metal
content. That difference in metal content of the star probably explains the distinction in planetary
size.

At the moment, two models compete to describe how gas giants come into being. One suggests a
rocky or icy core forms first, and that this core then attracts gas to form a thick atmosphere. The
other claims that instabilities in the early cloud around the star lead to the formation of gas clumps,
which themselves attract more gas. These clumps then contract to form a giant planet.

One explanation of Dr Adibekyan’s observations is that both hypotheses are correct, but for different
types of gas giant. The clouds around a metal-rich star will be full of ingredients for rocky and icy
cores around which small gas giants might form. The nebula of a metal-poor star, by contrast, would
have none of these. Any large gas giants would thus have to form from gas and gas alone.

This line of thinking does not directly explain the size discrepancy, but Dr Adibekyan suspects the
reason for it is that the process of forming a core would take a long time, during which much of the
gas in a cloud would be blown away by light and other radiation from the newly formed, and extremely
active, star. By the time the core was big enough to gather a significant atmosphere, it would be
small. That would limit the size of the eventual planet.

A missing piece of the puzzle is why small and large gas giants do not co-exist around high-metal-
content stars, for core formation does not obviously preclude a cloud breaking up into gas clumps
as well. Such mysteries are the stuff of science. As the cliché has it, more research is needed.

(Adapted from The Economist, 13th July 2018)

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 Marks
Question

Complete the sentences below by filling each gap with no more than THREE (3) words
from the text.

a) The two gas giants in the solar system are __________ and __________. 1

b) It is _______ to find stars with both large and small gas giants orbiting them. 1

c) Metal-rich stars are almost always orbited by ____________. 1

d) It would take __________ to form a rocky or icy planet core, meaning less gas 1
would be around.

e) It is still not clear why both kinds of planet do not ________ around stars with a 1
high metal content.

Total 5 Marks

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Case Study 3
Time to deliver

Read the text and answer the question below.

The belief that nothing good happens after midnight does not seem to apply to times of birth. Around
the world the peak hours for births that have not been induced by drugs fall between 1am and 7am;
the numbers then fall throughout the rest of the day. This has led many scientists to believe that
giving birth during the early morning offers some sort of evolutionary advantage, perhaps gained
long ago when hunter-gatherer mothers and their infants would benefit from having their group
reunited during night hours to help with care and to defend them against any predators.

The problem with this theory is that almost all the information on the timing of human births comes
from modern, urban settings, such as clinics and hospitals, which could produce artificial conditions
that affect the variation in timings. Not so, it turns out. As Carlye Chaney of Yale University shows
early-morning births are common to communities with both modern and traditional lifestyles.

The mothers that Ms Chaney and her colleagues chose to study live in Formosa, a rural province in
Argentina. They were divided into two groups that were considered to be both culturally and
genetically distinct. One group consisted of 1,278 women from the Criollo population, a people of
mixed Spanish and indigenous heritage who live relatively modern lives and typically engage in
small-scale farming and cattle-ranching. The second group was made up of 1,110 women who
belonged to the Wichí and Toba/Qom populations, two of the traditionally nomadic hunter-gatherer
peoples who also reside in the Formosa region. Because of Argentine health reforms in the 1980s,
which encouraged childbirth to take place in a formal medical setting, all the women in the study
gave birth in the delivery room of a rural hospital that recorded the events.

If a modern way of life plays a part in favouring early-morning births, Ms Chaney speculated that she
would see such timings dominate in the results for the Criollo women, but feature less prominently
among the results for the Wichí and Toba/Qom. Not so. The data and additional analysis make it
clear that there is no statistical difference in the average birth time found between the two groups.
Both showed a surge in births between 2am and 3am, and a big drop around 5pm. More specifically,
the average time of birth for the Criollo was 6.34am and that for the Wichí and Toba/Qom was
4.18am.

Ms Chaney believes that the mechanism driving the tendency for expectant mothers to give birth
during the early morning is likely to be melatonin, a hormone which is known to increase at the onset
of labour and is predominantly produced by the body between midnight and 5am. That mechanism
may well have come about, Ms Chaney suspects, because it was advantageous to go into labour
when most help was to hand. Today that means more work for the night shift.

(Adapted from The Economist, 26th April 2018)

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 Marks
Question

Read the following sentences and write true if the sentence is true and false if the
sentence is false.

a) The Criollo population have a traditional way of life. 1

b) The data shows that modern life affects the time of delivery. 1

c) The fewest number of births took place in the afternoon. 1

d) Melatonin is mostly created in the early hours of the morning. 1

Total 4 Marks

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 Section C – Writing
You must answer this question

Read the question below and write an answer of between 300 and 350 words.

Some people think that historical buildings in cities should be destroyed to make way for
new areas. Others think that historical buildings should be maintained. Discuss reasons
for both views and give your own opinion.

Total 20 Marks

End of paper

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