• Exam: FCE-O
• Course: READING and USE OF ENGLISH
• Part 7, Exam 1

Instructions

You are given a piece of text which is divided into sections, and a set of questions.

For each question choose the section which holds the correct answer.

The pass mark for this exercise is 60% or over and you need to be able to do this exercise in the exam in about 10 minutes.

The Collectors 1

(A) Don Edwards collects sewing machines. Q. 13) His interest began while he was looking for second-hand furniture and kept seeing 'beautiful old sewing machines that cost next to nothing to buy'. He just couldn't resist them and now he has about 200 sewing machines at home.Q. 9) Then a friend had a sewing machine that wouldn't work, so she asked Don to look at it for her. He worked on it for a few days and eventually got it going. This led to him opening a small stand in a London market, but most people seemed uninterested, until Q. 3) one day a dealer came and bought everything he had. He was so excited he decided to go into the business seriously, but had no further success there and had to move to another market. Nowadays, he concentrates on domestic machines in their original box containers with their handbooks and is often asked if he does any sewing with them. The answer is that, Q. 5) apart from making sure that they work, he rarely touches them.

(B) Peter Holmes collects vintage cameras. He started when he was a boy, and got most of his collection from jumble sales and dustbins. But sadly, when he needed to buy his first house, Q. 1) he had to sell his valuable collection in order to put down a deposit. He missed his cameras so much that a few years later, he took up the interest again and now has over a thousand cameras, the earliest dating from 1860. Q. 7) He hopes one day to open his own photographic museum, in competition with The most famous collection of cameras, The Royal Camera Collection in Bath. But that has so few items on show at the same time that Peter feels his collection will easily compete with it. Q. 15) His objective is to enable members of the public to come and touch and fiddle around with his cameras.

(C) Helen Sharp collects plastic. Her interest started when she was commissioned to write her first book and in order to do this, she had to do her research. She attended a course on work machinery to understand the manufacture of plastics. As she gathered information for her book, she also began to collect pieces of plastic from every imaginable source like junk shops, arcades, and the cupboards of friends. She felt it was vital to keep examples because Q. 6) we live in an age of throw-away items such as taperecorders, cassettes and hair dryers which are all replaced very quickly. Q. 10) She has become one of the foremost authorities on plastics in Britain and her collection consists of plastic objects of every kind, dating from the middle of the last century and illustrating the complex uses of plastic over the years. She published a second book, Classic Plastics: from Bakelite to High Tech, which is the first published guide to plastics collecting. It describes collections that can be visited and Q. 2) gives simple and safe home tests for identification. She admits that 'plastic is a mysterious substance and many people are frightened of it. Even so, Q. 11) the band of collectors is constantly expanding.'

(D) Josi Ponchin collects art deco fans. She started her collection by accident in 1966 when she saw a shoe box full of them at an auction she went to, although Q. 8) she already had twenty years of experience of collecting one thing or another behind her. She was furious when she lost out in the auction because someone else bid more than her, but was stunned whenQ. 4) he later came round to her flat and presented them to her. There were about five fans in the shoe-box and since then they've been exhibited in the first really big exhibition of 'art deco' in America. Q. 14) The fans are not normally on show, however, but are kept behind glass. They are extremely fragile and people are tempted to handle them. The idea is to have, one day, a black-lacquered room where they can be more easily seen. Josi doesn't restrict herself to fans of a particular period, but Q. 12) she will only buy a fan if it is in excellent condition.

Questions