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C1 Advanced · Reading & Use of English · Reading (Parts 5–8)

Part 5 · Multiple choice

Un texto largo (≈650–800 palabras) con 6 preguntas de 4 opciones: detalle, opinión, actitud, propósito y referencias.

Cambridge English: C1 Advanced (CAE)Reading and Use of EnglishPeso: 26 questions · Parts 5–7 = 2 marks each
Practicar Part 5 · Multiple choice gratis18 preguntas originales de esta destreza, con corrección al instante.

Qué evalúa

Un texto largo con 6 preguntas de 4 opciones: detalle, opinión, actitud, propósito, referencias.

Claves

Estrategia paso a paso

Trampas habituales

Ejemplo resuelto

'I would be lying if I said I had never felt it' → she admits the same temptation.

Preguntas de ejemplo

Intenta responder antes de abrir la solución. Las preguntas están en el idioma del examen.

Pregunta 1

Dificultad fácil≈ 3 min

Part 5 · The amateur's advantage

You are going to read an article about volunteers who collect scientific data about wildlife.

For much of the twentieth century, the study of the natural world was steadily ceded to professionals. The Victorian clergyman who spent his evenings classifying beetles, or the schoolteacher who kept meticulous records of the first cuckoo of spring, came to be regarded as a charming relic of a less specialised age – endearing, perhaps, but scarcely scientific. Real science, it was assumed, happened in laboratories and was conducted by people with doctorates and funding.

It is more than a little ironic, then, that some of the most valuable ecological data now being gathered comes from people with neither. Across Britain, tens of thousands of volunteers count butterflies along fixed routes, record the plants growing in randomly allocated squares of land, or note which birds visit their gardens on a designated weekend each winter. Individually, their observations are modest to the point of seeming trivial. Taken together, and sustained over decades, they amount to a picture of environmental change that no research team, however well resourced, could hope to assemble on its own.

Professional ecologists are, for the most part, disarmingly frank about this dependence. 'We simply couldn't afford to employ enough people to cover the ground,' one told me, with what sounded like a mixture of gratitude and embarrassment. The embarrassment, I suspect, stems from the fact that for many years amateur records were treated with a certain condescension within the discipline. They were dismissed as unreliable, riddled with misidentifications and skewed towards species that happened to be conspicuous or pleasing to the eye.

Those reservations were not entirely unfounded. A volunteer who is unsure whether she has glimpsed a marsh tit or a willow tit – two birds that even seasoned experts struggle to tell apart – may well hazard a guess, and a thousand guesses can distort a trend. But the remedy has turned out to lie less in excluding amateurs than in designing surveys around their limitations. Modern schemes ask volunteers to follow standardised methods, provide training and identification guides, and apply statistical techniques that compensate for the errors that inevitably creep in. The data that emerge are not flawless, but then neither, it should be said, are those produced by professionals, whose own surveys are often too brief and too sparse to reveal long-term change.

What intrigues me most, however, is not the data but what becomes of the people who collect them. Talk to long-standing volunteers and a pattern soon emerges. Many began with no more than a vague interest in nature and a wish to make themselves useful. After a few years of walking the same route every week, they describe becoming alert to things that had previously been invisible to them: the particular week when the hawthorn comes into flower, the way a field changes character when the farmer alters his mowing schedule. One retired engineer told me that counting moths had 'rewired' the way he looked at his own garden. Where he had once seen a lawn and some flowerbeds, he now saw a place in which something was always happening.

This, it seems to me, is a benefit that rarely features in grant applications or annual reports. Citizen science is generally justified in terms of its usefulness to researchers, and rightly so. But it also yields something less tangible: a population of people who pay close attention to the living world around them, and who are therefore more likely to notice – and to mind – when it begins to slip away.

There is a risk, of course, in romanticising all this. Volunteer schemes depend heavily on retired people with time on their hands, and organisers worry, with good reason, about who will take their place. Younger people are enthusiastic in short bursts – a one-off count, a smartphone app that identifies a flower from a photograph – but noticeably less inclined to commit to walking the same route every fortnight for twenty years. If the great strength of amateur recording lies in its persistence, then its future hinges on finding ways to make that kind of commitment appealing to a generation that has grown up expecting results to be instant.

The writer mentions the retired engineer in order to illustrate

  1. A. how people with technical training bring useful skills to recording
  2. B. how gardens can be more varied habitats than they first appear
  3. C. how recording can alter people's perception of familiar places
  4. D. why moth recording appeals more to older volunteers than younger ones
Ver respuesta y explicación

Respuesta correcta: C. how recording can alter people's perception of familiar places

Explicación

The engineer illustrates volunteers 'becoming alert to things that had previously been invisible to them': his own garden changed from 'a lawn and some flowerbeds' to a place where 'something was always happening'. A: his profession is incidental. B: the point is about how he sees the garden, not the garden's value as a habitat. D: age is discussed only in the final paragraph, and not in relation to moths.

Pregunta 2

Dificultad media≈ 3 min

Part 5 · Late starter

You are going to read an article in which a writer describes learning to play the cello as an adult.

I was forty-three when I bought my first cello, a decision my family greeted with the polite bewilderment usually reserved for announcements of a sudden passion for competitive ballroom dancing. I had no musical training to speak of. As a child I had endured two terms of recorder lessons, an experience that left me convinced, for the next thirty years, that I was simply one of those people who are 'not musical'. It is a phrase I now regard with deep suspicion.

What prompted the purchase was not, as my wife suspected, a midlife crisis, or at least not one of the conventional kind. I had been to a concert with a friend who played in an amateur orchestra, and afterwards, over a drink, she mentioned that most of the cellists sitting beside her had started as adults. I remember feeling something close to indignation. For decades I had assumed that the window for learning an instrument closed somewhere around the age of twelve, and here was evidence that it had been open all along. The cello I bought the following week was, in a sense, an act of protest against my own assumptions.

The first months were humbling in a way I had not anticipated. I had expected my fingers to be clumsy; I had not expected my ears to be so unreliable. My teacher, a patient woman in her sixties who had taught children for most of her career, would play a note and ask me to match it, and I would produce something I was certain was identical, only to watch her wince almost imperceptibly. Adults, she told me, are often far harsher critics of their own playing than children are, but they are also, paradoxically, worse at actually hearing what they are doing. Children simply play; adults listen to an idealised version of the music in their heads and assume that is what is coming out of the instrument.

There were advantages to starting late, though they took a while to reveal themselves. Unlike a child, I had chosen to be there, and nobody was obliging me to practise. I also brought to the lessons a lifetime of experience in learning other things, which meant that I knew, in a way a ten-year-old cannot, that progress is rarely steady. Some weeks I seemed to go backwards. Rather than concluding that I had no talent, I learnt to treat these plateaux as a normal part of the process – a stage in which, as my teacher put it, 'the hands are catching up with the head'.

What I was less prepared for was the effect the cello would have on the rest of my life. My job involves long hours in front of a screen, and I had grown used to a kind of low-level mental fog by the end of each day. Half an hour of scales, I discovered, cleared it more effectively than anything else I had tried. It is impossible to think about an unanswered email while trying to keep a bow straight; the instrument demands a total attention that I had not given to anything for years. I would not go as far as some enthusiasts, who claim that learning music in middle age can stave off mental decline – the evidence for that seems to me suggestive rather than conclusive – but I am in no doubt that it has made me calmer.

Five years on, I play in the same amateur orchestra as the friend who first set me on this path. I am, I should stress, a long way from being a good cellist. I sit near the back, I occasionally lose my place in difficult passages, and there are pieces I will probably never manage to play at the correct speed. But I have stopped measuring myself against the professional recordings I listen to at home. The point, I have come to realise, was never to become an accomplished musician. It was to discover that the story I had told about myself for most of my adult life – that there were certain things I was simply not built for – was just that: a story, and one I was free to change.

Friends occasionally ask whether I regret not having started sooner. The honest answer is that I do, a little. But I suspect that if I had taken up the cello at twelve, I would have given it up at fourteen, as most of my classmates did with their instruments. Coming to it late meant coming to it willingly, and that, I think, has made all the difference.

What does the writer suggest about his belief that he was 'not musical'?

  1. A. It was shared by the other members of his family.
  2. B. It was the result of poor teaching at his school.
  3. C. It was based on very limited evidence.
  4. D. It explained his family's reaction to the cello.
Ver respuesta y explicación

Respuesta correcta: C. It was based on very limited evidence.

Explicación

C: the belief came from 'two terms of recorder lessons' and he now regards it 'with deep suspicion' – a whole self-image built on one brief experience. A and D: his family reacted with 'polite bewilderment', but nothing says they thought he was unmusical or that the belief explained their reaction. B: he 'endured' the lessons, but he never blames the teaching.

Pregunta 3

Dificultad difícil≈ 3 min

Part 5 · The translator's ear

You are going to read an article in which a literary translator writes about her work.

People who discover that I translate novels for a living tend to ask one of two questions. The first – 'Isn't that going to be done by computers soon?' – I have learnt to deflect with a smile, partly because an honest answer would take longer than most people are prepared to listen. The second is more searching: 'Do you have to be a writer yourself?' When I started out, I would have said no, and said it with some conviction. I am now fairly sure that I was wrong.

When I took on my first book, a slim Portuguese novel about a lighthouse keeper, I approached it much as I had approached the exercises set at university. I would read a sentence, establish precisely what it meant, and then hunt for the English words that meant the same thing. The result was scrupulously accurate, and my editor – a woman who had been in the business for thirty years and had long since stopped being impressed by anything – returned it to me covered in pencil marks. 'It's all correct,' she had written on the first page, 'and none of it is alive.'

It took me the best part of a year to grasp what she meant. I had been treating meaning as though it were a solid object that could be lifted out of one language and set down, intact, in another. But the meaning of a sentence in a novel is only partly contained in its words. It resides, too, in its rhythm, in the length and weight of its clauses, in the faint echoes it sets up with sentences fifty pages earlier. A line that is mournful in Portuguese can become merely informative in English if you translate the words and ignore the music – and no amount of checking against a dictionary will reveal that anything has gone missing.

This is where the question of being a writer comes in. To reproduce the effect of a sentence, rather than simply its content, a translator has to make choices for which no reference book offers any guidance. Should a long, winding sentence be broken in two because English readers have less patience with subordinate clauses? Should a joke that hinges on a pun be replaced with a different joke altogether, or explained away in a footnote that kills it? Each of these decisions involves a small act of creation, and a translator who shrinks from making them, however conscientious in other respects, will produce something that is faithful in every detail and false as a whole.

There is, of course, a danger in the opposite direction, and it is one I have learnt to recognise in my own drafts. I have read translations in which the translator's voice is so insistent that the original author seems to have been quietly written out of the book. Every sentence is burnished, every image heightened, and the result reads beautifully while bearing little resemblance to the work it claims to represent. I sometimes suspect that such translators are frustrated novelists who have found a way of publishing their own prose under somebody else's name. That may be uncharitable, but the temptation is real, and I would be lying if I claimed never to have felt it.

The balance I try to strike is something like that of a musician playing a piece written by someone else. The notes are not mine to alter, but the performance is. Two pianists can play the same sonata with complete fidelity to the score and still sound nothing alike, and it does not follow that either of them has got it wrong. What matters is that the audience comes away having heard the composer rather than the performer showing off. Reviewers, incidentally, rarely see it this way: a translation tends to be noticed only when something jars, which is rather like judging a pianist solely on the absence of wrong notes.

As for the machines, I am less dismissive than I once was. Automatic translation has become remarkably adept at the kind of text in which accuracy is all that counts: instruction manuals, contracts, weather forecasts. I would not relish translating any of those by hand again, and I doubt that many of my colleagues would either. But a novel is not a set of instructions. It is an attempt by one person to make another person feel something, and until a machine can tell the difference between a sentence that is correct and one that is alive, I suspect my editor's pencil – she retired years ago, but I can still hear it scratching – will go on being needed.

What is the writer's attitude towards translators whose own voice is too prominent?

  1. A. She believes they are usually unaware of how much they have altered the text.
  2. B. She considers them more of a danger than translators who are overly literal.
  3. C. She suspects their work would be better received if they wrote their own novels.
  4. D. She is critical of them, while admitting she understands the impulse.
Ver respuesta y explicación

Respuesta correcta: D. She is critical of them, while admitting she understands the impulse.

Explicación

She says their versions bear 'little resemblance to the work', then concedes 'the temptation is real, and I would be lying if I claimed never to have felt it'. A: she suspects the opposite – a deliberate way of publishing 'their own prose'. B: she calls it 'a danger in the opposite direction' but never ranks the two dangers. C twists 'frustrated novelists': she says nothing about how their own novels would be received.

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