Exam C1

Question 1

Part 1
For questions 1 – 8, read the text below and decide which answer (A, B, C or D) best fits each gap.
There is an example at the beginning (0).
Example:
0 A straight B common C everyday D conventional
Studying black bears
After years studying North America’s black bears in the (0) [blank_start]CONVENTIONAL[blank_end] way, wildlife biologist Luke
Robertson felt no closer to understanding the creatures. He realised that he had to (1) ...........their
trust. Abandoning scientific detachment, he took the daring step of forming relationships with the
animals, bringing them food to gain their acceptance.

Accepted Answer

CONVENTIONAL

Answer

INTERESTING

Answer

COMPLETE

Question 2

Training sports champions
What are the abilities that a (0) …….. sports person needs?

Accepted Answer

COME

Answer

PROFESSION

Answer

FIT

Question 3

James would only speak to the head of department alone.

James [blank_start]INSISTED ON SPEAKING[blank_end] (ON) to the head of department alone

Accepted Answer

INSISTED ON SPEAKING

Question 4

Part 5
You are going to read the introduction to a book about the history of colour. For questions 31 – 36,
choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best according to the text.

Introduction to a book about the history of c
This book examines how the ever-changing role of colour in society has been reflected in manuscripts, stained
glass, clothing, painting and popular culture. Colour is a natural phenomenon, of course, but it is also a complex
cultural construct that resists generalization and, indeed, analysis itself. No doubt this is why serious works
devoted to colour are rare, and rarer still are those that aim to study it in historical context. Many authors search
for the universal or archetypal truths they imagine reside in colour, but for the historian, such truths do not exist.
Colour is first and foremost a social phenomenon. There is no transcultural truth to colour perception, despite
what many books based on poorly grasped neurobiology or – even worse – on pseudoesoteric pop psychology
would have us believe. Such books unfortunately clutter the bibliography on the subject, and even do it harm.
The silence of historians on the subject of colour, or more particularly their difficulty in conceiving colour as a
subject separate from other historical phenomena, is the result of three different sets of problems. The first
concerns documentation and preservation. We see the colours transmitted to us by the past as time has altered
them and not as they were originally. Moreover, we see them under light conditions that often are entirely
different from those known by past societies. And finally, over the decades we have developed the habit of
looking at objects from the past in black-and-white photographs and, despite the current diffusion of colour
photography, our ways of thinking about and reacting to these objects seem to have remained more or less black
and white.
The second set of problems concerns methodology. As soon as the historian seeks to study colour, he must
grapple with a host of factors all at once: physics, chemistry, materials, and techniques of production, as well as
iconography, ideology, and the symbolic meanings that colours convey. How to make sense of all of these
elements? How can one establish an analytical model facilitating the study of images and coloured objects? No
researcher, no method, has yet been able to resolve these problems, because among the numerous facts
pertaining to colour, a researcher tends to select those facts that support his study and to conveniently forget
those that contradict it. This is clearly a poor way to conduct research. And it is made worse by the temptation
to apply to the objects and images of a given historical period information found in texts of that period. The
proper method – at least in the first phase of analysis – is to proceed as do palaeontologists (who must study
cave paintings without the aid of texts): by extrapolating from the images and the objects themselves a logic and
a system based on various concrete factors such as the rate of occurrence of particular objects and motifs, their
distribution and disposition. In short, one undertakes the internal structural analysis with which any study of an
image or coloured object should begin.
The third set of problems is philosophical: it is wrong to project our own conceptions and definitions of colour
onto the images, objects and monuments of past centuries. Our judgements and values are not those of previous
societies (and no doubt they will change again in the future). For the writer-historian looking at the definitions
and taxonomy of colour, the danger of anachronism is very real. For example, the spectrum with its natural
order of colours was unknown before the seventeenth century, while the notion of primary and secondary
colours did not become common until the nineteenth century. These are not eternal notions but stages in the
ever-changing history of knowledge.
I have reflected on such issues at greater length in my previous work, so while the present book does address
certain of them, for the most part it is devoted to other topics. Nor is it concerned only with the history of colour
in images and artworks – in any case that area still has many gaps to be filled. Rather, the aim of this book is to
examine all kinds of objects in order to consider the different facets of the history of colour and to show how far
beyond the artistic sphere this history reaches. The history of painting is one thing; that of colour is another,
much larger, question. Most studies devoted to the history of colour err in considering only the pictorial, artistic
or scientific realms. But the lessons to be learned from colour and its real interest lie elsewhere.
31 What problem regarding colour does the writer explain in the first paragraph?

Accepted Answer

B. Analysis is complicated by the bewildering number of natural colours

Answer

A Our view of colour is strongly affected by changing fashion.

Answer

C. Colours can have different associations in different parts of the world

Answer

D. Certain popular books have dismissed colour as insignificant

Exam C1

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