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Task 1: Paddington

Read the text and the headings below. Then decide which heading best fits each paragraph and put the correct number into the box. There is one more heading than you need.

Article by Amelia Tait published in The New Statesman, 4 December 2024



1

1
Imagine you are an anthropologist, tasked with visiting Britain and investigating its culture. Almost
2
immediately, you would find him: on the sides of trains and on the back of coins, on jars of preserves
3
and in books of stamps. There are statues of him in Birmingham and Cardiff, not to mention those
4
in Edinburgh, Liverpool, York, Chester, Reading, Sunderland, Manchester and Penrith. He is not the
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king of England, but you would be forgiven for making that mistake. After all, he has been to
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Buckingham Palace and had tea with Queen Elizabeth II. He once had his own exhibition at the
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British Library and currently has his own bus tour. He is Paddington Bear – and who’s to say that he
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doesn’t rule over us all?


2

9
Paddington originally came from Darkest Peru, but it’s almost impossible to list all the different places
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you can find him today. The UN officially recognises 193 member states and two non-member
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observer states globally, while the CIA website records 261: either way, Paddington’s most recent
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animated television series, The Adventures of Paddington, is available in 232. The accident-prone,
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marmalade-loving bear has starred in 29 books and three blockbuster live-action films. Since 2018,
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he has had his own “town” dedicated to him in the Sagamiko theme park in Japan, and “The
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Paddington Bear Experience”, which opened in London this May, has generated £4.5m in ticket
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sales. To date, more than 27 million Paddington teddy bears have been sold worldwide. The bear’s
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latest movie, Paddington in Peru, revolves around a quest for gold. The one hour and 46 minute run
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time could have been cut considerably if someone offered Paddington a mirror.


3

19
Paddington Bear began life in the shops. On Christmas Eve 1956, a Berkshire-born, 30-year-old
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BBC cameraman named Michael Bond saw a small teddy sitting alone on a shelf at Selfridges,
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looking “rather sorry for himself”. Bond bought the bear for his wife and, months later, started writing
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a story about it “in order to get my brain working that morning”. Paddington was so named because
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Bond lived near the station; the iconic brown label around his neck (“Please look after this bear.
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Thank you”) was inspired by news footage of evacuees Bond had seen during the war. “Paddington’s
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old hat and his duffle coat were simply replicas of what I happened to be wearing at the time,” Bond
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wrote in a 1996 autobiography, Bears & Forebears: A Life So Far.


4

27
“Mr and Mrs Brown first met Paddington on a railway platform,” Bond’s first book in the series, A
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Bear Called Paddington, began. Following the now-familiar story of an immigrant bear adopted by a
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British family, it was released in October 1958 and was an instant success. The chaotic but
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permanently polite character captured hearts, with the New York Times declaring: “Paddington is
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certainly the funniest and most charming bear to appear in a book in a long time.” Sequels followed
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thick and fast, like marmalade spread on sandwich bread. Paddington’s escapades were brought to
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life by artist Peggy Fortnum’s pen and ink illustrations as much as Bond’s words. “I don’t like whimsy
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or sentiment,” she once wrote. “This bear had character. I felt a real rapport with this brainless
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innocent who always came out on top.”


5

36
Paddington really did come out on top – once, the police had to be called after crowds flooded a
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Glasgow book signing offering free marmalade sandwiches. Still, merchandising didn’t begin in
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earnest until ten or so books later. In January 1976, the BBC began airing a new stop-motion series,
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Paddington. Because the BBC only paid around a fifth of the show’s £60,000 budget, it was a risky
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endeavour for producer Graham Clutterbuck, who – according to Bond – needed “to bridge the
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financial gap as quickly as possible by the sale of merchandise”. […]


6

42
“It’s very much not a children’s brand; it’s much, much broader than that,” says Harriet Hastings,
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founder of the biscuit company Biscuiteers, which sells various Paddington iced biscuits for “50th
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birthdays and first birthdays” alike. David Hutchinson, founder of the Path Entertainment Group,
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agrees. This summer, Hutchinson launched the Paddington Bear Experience, an immersive event
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in which audience members can walk through the bear’s home, interact with actors and play toddler-
47
friendly games. He is now looking into selling “adult-focused” evening tickets.


7

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Tourists love Paddington – Biscuiteers displays his biscuits next to London- and royal-family-themed
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ones because “it very much fits into that category”. Paddington “met” the Queen three months before
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her death in a televised sketch commemorating her Platinum Jubilee – as a result, more than 1,000
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teddies were left by mourners at royal palaces. “It’s a very British brand: it stands for good ethos, the
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good qualities of British society,” Hutchinson says. As such, “It’s chiming with international
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audiences…You go to Buckingham Palace, you see Big Ben, you go to see the bear.” […]


8

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Why exactly is Paddington the bear of the moment? We also have nostalgic and emotional ties to
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British-born Pooh – he also met the Queen (in a 2016 book) and starred his own shiny live-action
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film two years later. But while he doesn’t struggle for merchandising opportunities (you can buy an
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official Disney Winnie-the-Pooh toilet paper holder), Pooh doesn’t have the same cultural
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dominance.


9

59
The simple answer offered by those in the Paddington business is that Paddington represents
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something else – but what, exactly? He can be seen both on protest signs reading “Refugees
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Welcome” and in popular royalist memes (in one viral illustration, he appears to be leading the late
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Queen into the afterlife). He is an optical illusion that looks different depending on the angle you view
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him from. As the cultural critic Henry Wong noted in Esquire: “Paddington is, now more than ever, a
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four-quadrant bear: cute to the young, comforting to the old, poster boy for immigration, pals with
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royalty.”

Number

Heading

Symbolising identity

Several coincidences

Unfulfilled expectations

Pardonable misconception

Appreciated for personality

Delayed commercialisation

Marketed to all generations

Similar, but distinct relevance

Canvas for individual projections

Shown in multiple genres and locations
9 BE

Task 2: Donald Trump

Read the text about Donald Trump.

Then tick () the correct answer (a, b, c, or d). There is only one correct answer.

Article published in The Economist, 1 February, 2025

1
Donald Trump invoked the 1890s in laying out the agenda for his second term. But from his demand
2
for the Panama Canal to his declaration of a national energy emergency to his order releasing the
3
records of the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the music he grooved to at his inaugural balls,
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Mr Trump, in his first days back in office, has instead evoked a different decade: the 1970s, formative
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years for him, and for America.
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It was in 1971 that Mr Trump, then in his mid-20s, moved from Queens into Manhattan, taking a rent-
7
stabilised studio apartment with a view of a water tank. He had ambitions to turn his father’s Brooklyn-
8
based business building middle-class housing into something grander. By the decade’s end he would
9
be a millionaire in his own right, married to a glamorous immigrant and a fixture at clubs like Studio
10
54, with growing celebrity for projects such as his eponymous tower rising on 5th Avenue.
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As he exited the 1970s in his mid-30s, the apprentice years of adulthood behind him, Mr Trump, like
12
many Americans, had reasons to be cynical about politics and business, to be fearful of inflation and
13
oil scarcity and urban crime, to be drawn to conspiracy theories, to think America had lost the national
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self-assurance of his childhood in the 1950s. During what Tom Wolfe branded “The ‘Me’ Decade”,
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amid revelations of dirty deeds by sainted figures, as Americans more freely embraced and divorced
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each other, old ideas about duty and service came to seem like frauds. “Forget foundationless
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traditions, forget the ‘moral’ standards others may have tried to cram down your throat,” advised one
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bestseller in those years, “Looking out for Number One”.
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“The 1970s were daunting and frightening because habits and institutions that had succeeded
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brilliantly for half a century suddenly sputtered,” David Frum writes in his history of the decade, “How
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We Got Here: The 70s”. “Never – not even during the Depression – had American pride and self-
22
confidence plunged deeper.” The disillusion, fear and reaction of those years hardened into the
23
worldview that has carried Mr Trump twice to the Oval Office.
24
At the start of the 1970s Mr Trump met Roy Cohn, the man who probably influenced him more than
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anyone besides his father, sharpening his reflex to fight all comers for every advantage, as he is
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doing now as president. A ferocious New York lawyer, Mr Cohn became Mr Trump’s mentor,
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“introducing him to the netherworld of sordid quid pro quos that Cohn ruled”, wrote Mr Trump’s
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dogged biographer, Wayne Barrett, in “Trump”. Over the course of the 1970s Mr Trump became the
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largest individual donor in New York state and local elections. “I can buy a US senator for $200,000,”
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he once told an associate back then.
31
Revelations spilling out of the Watergate investigations were teaching all Americans similar lessons,
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and implicating more than just President Richard Nixon. America’s great corporations for years had
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evaded the law with donations to politicians of both parties. Not only Nixon had secretly recorded
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meetings in the Oval Office. So had Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy.
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In 1976 Congress for the first time created a permanent committee to oversee the intelligence
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agencies, and it revealed shocking secrets about coups and assassinations by the CIA. Then came
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revelations about the FBI. Robert Kennedy himself had ordered wiretaps on Martin Luther King. As
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suspicions of skulduggery grew, Congress in 1976 ordered investigations into the assassinations of
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John Kennedy and King. Hollywood seized on the spectre of rot in America’s foundations for the
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plots of such movies as “Three Days of the Condor”, about CIA murders of Americans, “Chinatown”
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and the “Godfather” series. Mr Trump’s response in 2017 when an interviewer called Vladimir Putin
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a killer – “You think our country’s so innocent?” – was straight out of the 1970s.
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Government was coming to seem not just corrupt but incompetent. New York City teetered at the
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edge of bankruptcy as officials struggled to stem rising theft and homicide. “Welcome to Fear City”
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read pamphlets bearing a death’s head that police officers in casual clothes handed out to tourists
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in 1975. During a citywide blackout in 1977, chaos swept the streets, resulting in hundreds of injuries
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to police officers and thousands of arrests for looting. One might well have called it American
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carnage.
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Nationally, new laws in the 1960s led to a surge in immigration in the 1970s, and illegal immigration
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along with it. Backlash was building against new rights granted to non-citizens, as it was against
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policies meant to advance integration and equality such as affirmative action and busing. Mr Trump
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first hired Cohn to defend him against a Justice Department suit accusing the Trumps’ company of
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excluding black renters. Asked at a deposition in 1974 when the first black people moved into one
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of his projects, Mr Trump replied, “I don’t care and I don’t know.” He was insisting on the same sort
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of “colour-blindness” he declared in his inaugural address this month to now be government policy.
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Mr Trump once lamented that during the 1970s America lost “the feeling of supremacy that this
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country had in the 1950s”. In the 1970s, ceding control of the Panama Canal divided conservatives.
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In a televised debate with Ronald Reagan, William Buckley, the founding editor of National Review,
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said turning the canal over would bring Americans “increased security and increased self-esteem”.
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Time has proved him correct as far as security goes. But to many on the right the treaty with Panama
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became an exhibit of the same weakness that led to failure in Vietnam and the Iranian hostage crisis.
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Mr Trump’s pledge to retake the canal is a direct assault on the 1970s, and it underscores a basic
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question about his second term: will he lead Americans to transcend that decade at last, or to wallow
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in it?

  1. The example of the Kennedy files is used to illustrate

a

Trump’s deep fascination with historical mysteries.

b

Trump’s general willingness to confront unpleasant truths.

c

how Trump’s current outlook is rooted in a specific period.

d

how Trump’s domestic decisions are in line with public interest.

2. When Trump first moved to Manhattan, he

a

already had a lavish life-style.

b

had high-flying plans.

c

ran a huge financial risk.

d

wanted to find his true calling.

3. Tom Wolfe saw the 1970s as characterized by

a

complacency.

b

doubt.

c

egoism.

d

introspection.

4. David Frum describes the 1970s as

a

chaotic and confusing.

b

reckless and dangerous.

c

shallow and materialistic.

d

uncertain and scary.

5. In his biography “Trump”, Wayne Barrett writes about the impact of

a

easy money on Trump’s development.

b

family values on Trump’s development.

c

mafia connections on Trump’s development.

d

role models on Trump’s development.

6. The Watergate investigations showed how politicians

a

and entrepreneurs ignored each other.

b

as well as companies were involved in questionable activities.

c

had continuously spied on major firms.

d

were unable to compromise on economic issues.

7. A congressional committee

a

authorized the killing of several American celebrities.

b

suspected American filmmakers of treason.

c

found out American institutions had used unethical means.

d

tried to cover up numerous American atrocities.

8. The situation in New York City in the 1970s

a

contradicted developments in the rest of the country.

b

exemplified what was wrong with the country.

c

pioneered solutions for problems in the country.

d

represented the best and the worst of the country.

9. Progressive policies of the 1960s are said to have

a

collapsed completely in the 1970s.

b

continued in more cautious form in the 1970s.

c

produced groundbreaking decisions in the 1970s.

d

sparked counterreactions in the 1970s.

10. The example of the Panama Canal is used to illustrate

a

America’s dominance in global affairs.

b

conflicting views on America’s role in the world.

c

contradictory strategies of the American military.

d

the burden of America’s expansionist past.

Now think of the text as a whole:

11. The article focuses on

a

how Trump became who he is.

b

how Trump has changed his country.

c

what Trump envisions for himself.

d

what Trump has achieved so far.

11 BE

Task 3: Life in the Iron Mills

Read the following excerpt fromLife in the Iron Mills by Rebecca Harding.

Complete the following table. You need not write complete sentences. Unless otherwise specified, name one aspect.

Harding, R.: Life in the Iron Mills (1861)

1
“I have not seen Hugh the day, Deb. The old man says his watch lasts till the mornin’.”
2
The woman sprang up, and hastily began to arrange some bread and flitch in a tin pail, and to pour
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her own measure of ale into a bottle. Tying on her bonnet, she blew out the candle.
4
“Lay ye down, Janey dear,” she said, gently, covering her with the old rags. “Hur can eat the potatoes,
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if hur’s hungry.”
6
“Where are ye goin’, Deb? The rain’s sharp.”
7
“To the mill, with Hugh’s supper.”
8
“Let him bide till th’ morn. Sit ye down.”
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“No, no,” – sharply pushing her off. “The boy’ll starve.”
10
She hurried from the cellar, while the child wearily coiled herself up for sleep. […]
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Not many even of the inhabitants of a manufacturing town know the vast machinery of system by
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which the bodies of workmen are governed, that goes on unceasingly from year to year. The hands
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of each mill are divided into watches that relieve each other as regularly as the sentinels of an army.
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By night and day the work goes on, the unsleeping engines groan and shriek, the fiery pools of metal
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boil and surge. Only for a day in the week, in half-courtesy to public censure, the fires are partially
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veiled; but as soon as the clock strikes midnight, the great furnaces break forth with renewed fury,
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the clamor begins with fresh, breathless vigor, the engines sob and shriek like “gods in pain.”
18
As Deborah hurried down through the heavy rain, the noise of these thousand engines sounded
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through the sleep and shadow of the city like far-off thunder. The mill to which she was going lay on
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the river, a mile below the city-limits. It was far, and she was weak, aching from standing twelve
21
hours at the spools. Yet it was her almost nightly walk to take this man his supper, though at every
22
square she sat down to rest, and she knew she should receive small word of thanks. […]
23
She found the man she was looking for, at last, heaping coal on a furnace. He had not time to eat
24
his supper; so she went behind the furnace, and waited. Only a few men were with him, and they
25
noticed her only by a “Hyur comes t’hunchback, Wolfe.”
26
Deborah was stupid with sleep; her back pained her sharply; and her teeth chattered with cold, with
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the rain that soaked her clothes and dripped from her at every step. She stood, however, patiently
28
holding the pail, and waiting.
29
“Hout, woman! Ye look like a drowned cat. Come near to the fire,” – said one of the men, approaching
30
to scrape away the ashes.
31
She shook her head. Wolfe had forgotten her. He turned, hearing the man, and came closer.
32
“I did no’ think; gi’ me my supper, woman.”
33
She watched him eat with a painful eagerness. With a woman’s quick instinct, she saw that he was
34
not hungry, – was eating to please her. Her pale, watery eyes began to gather a strange light.
35
“Is’t good, Hugh? T’ ale was a bit sour, I feared.”
36
“No, good enough.” He hesitated a moment. “Ye’re tired, poor lass! Bide here till I go. Lay down there
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on that heap of ash, and go to sleep.”

1

How does Janey react when Deborah prepares to leave?

• __________________________________________________

2

How is the relationship between machines and humans portrayed?

• __________________________________________________

3

What does Deborah's behavior at the mill indicate?

• __________________________________________________

4

Why does Hugh eat his supper?

• __________________________________________________

Now think of the text as a whole.

Tick () the correct answer (a, b, c, or d). There is only one correct answer.

5

The atmosphere in the excerpt is

a

bleak.

b

scary.

c

nostalgic.

d

mysterious.

5 BE

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