MAGISTER

OPOSICIONES AL PROFESORADO Inglés Secundaria

PRACTICE EXERCISES (PART B – LITERATURE)

NOVEMBER 2015

1. TRANSLATIONS.

A. Translate the following text into English.

Alguien muy sabio aconsejaba no temer más que el miedo, pero tampoco conocía la fórmula
para espantar a ese depredador. Muchos niños sienten terror ante la oscuridad. Tal vez sea irracional,
es la intuición de que ésta sólo la pueden habitar el desamparo y los monstruos. Los pavores de los
adultos tienen más sentido. Miedo a las enfermedades lentas y devastadoras, a las pérdidas, a la
locura, al fin de amor, a la traición, a la soledad, a la ruina económica. Saben que esos enemigos son
reales y siempre están al acecho. Si uno dispone de dioses, la necesidad del martirio y la seguridad de
que está recompensado en el más allá, imagino que esos terrores atávicos se llevan mucho mejor.
Pero los agnósticos lo tienen crudo.

El mar no está incluido entre los miedos permanentes de la mayoría de los seres humanos. Su
peligro solo deben constatarlo pescadores y marinos que han sobrevivido a tormentas chungas.
También conozco a unas cuantas personas a las que nadie podría convencer para que se dieran un
baño nocturno en el mar después de haber sufrido la secuencia incial de Tiburón y su instalación a
perpetuidad en el subconsciente. También tengo recuerdos de infancia que me aseguran que los
monstruos en el cine japonés salían siempre del mar, pero sabías que era de mentira.

El mar existe para ofrecer relajamiento a los sentidos al observarlo, crear ensoñación,
alimentar la poesía y la literatura, simbolizar la libertad en tantas películas (unas buenas y otras
malas) en las que inevitablemente sus perdidos o angustiados personajes encuentran la liberación
espiritual al encontrarse finalmente con él.

Pero ese monstruo algunas veces ataca sin declaración de guerra, sin que nadie pueda
imaginar un minuto antes que va a desatar el fin del mundo. La imagen de esas aguas tranquilas que
se repliegan de la playa para embestir inmediatamente con los atributos del Apocalipsis protagonizará
las pesadillas de los que sobrevivieron el infierno.

De Carlos Boyero
Inglés Secundaria ©MELC,S.A. (MAGISTER) Práctico Parte B (Literatura)-November 2014

B. Translate the following fragment into Spanish.

I left as soon as possible to commence my stake-out in secrecy. It was difficult to reach the
Villa Rotunda without being seen from the house. A number of the guests, I knew, would be in the
drawing room that overlooked the South Lawn at the back of which the villa stood. I had, therefore,
to skirt the entire lawn in a wide loop and achieve the summerhouse from the rear. This necessitated
the negotiation of much thick vegetation. The bushes and shrubs had set themselves the happy
afternoon task, it soon came to my notice, of attempting to knock from my hand, by the use of
cunningly upthrust roots and protruding twigs, the cup of coffee I had foolishly decided to take with
me on the journey. By the time I had grunted myself through the rear window of the Villa there was
no more than an inch of coffee remaining, much supplemented by garden detritus. An inch of after-
luncheon coffee, I reflected, is better than a centimetre and I drank it gratefully down, leaf-fragments,
thunder-flies, twig-bark and all. None the less, the spillage of so much was shortly to cause me a
moment of panic, as I was to discover.
Settling cosily on the croquet trunk once more, I watched a spider swing from the ceiling and
pondered on the problem of effort. To stand up takes effort, to move about takes effort: simply to be
still, to do no more than endure, even that takes effort. Effort is expended strength. Strength comes
from food. We carry on because we eat. But creative effort? How is that energy replenished? Where
does creative energy come from? From food also? Then how can it be that a poet, say, who once
could write, can suddenly write no more? Not, surely, because has stopped eating spinach? David
thinks he has a creative energy that comes from God knows what. From nature, from some intricate
connected web, a sustaining field of force such as they talk about in that absurd science-fiction story
with Alec Guinness. . .
'It´s burning! It´s burning!'
An excited voice outside the window. I leapt to my feet. The coffee cup fell from my lap and
smashed on the floor.
Not David´s voice. Nor Clara´s.
I went to the window and looked out.
There below me were the twins, squatting on the pathway that ran between the rear of the Villa
Rotonda and the edge of the lake. One of them had a magnifying-glass in his hand, the other was
holding a snail. A sizzle of steam rose from a small hole in the snail´s shell.
'Hoi!' I shouted.
They turned in guilty alarm and then smiled when they saw who it was.
'Hello, Uncle Ted.'
'We´re experimenting.'

From The Hippopotamus, by Stephen Fry

2
Inglés Secundaria ©MELC,S.A. (MAGISTER) Práctico Parte B (Literatura)-November 2014

2. TEXT ANALYSIS. Read the following text and answer the questions below:

Jim closed his eyes. He was very tired but awake, thinking of the rice he had just eaten,
retasting every fishy grain. Basie talked, his devious voice circling the fume-filled air with its
scent of cologne and Craven A. He thought of his mother smoking in the drawing room at
Amherst Avenue. Now that he had met these two American sailors he would be seeing her again.
5 He would stay with Basie and Frank; together they could go out to the boom of freighters;
sooner or later the Japanese patrol boats would notice them.

A hot, fishy breath filled his face. Jim awoke with a gasp. Frank´s huge body leaned across
him, heavy arms on his thighs, hands feeling in his blazer pockets. Jim pushed him away, and
10 Frank calmly returned to his deck-chair and continued to polish the portholes.
They were alone together in the cabin. Jim could hear Basie on the bamboo catwalk
below. The door of the truck slammed, and the elderly engine began to throb, then stopped
abruptly. There was a distant blast from the Idzumo´s siren. With a meaningful glance at Jim,
Frank buffed the faded brass.
15 'You know, kid, you have a talent for getting on people´s nerves. How is it the Japs
haven´t picked you up? You must be quick on your feet.'
'I tried to surrender,' Jim explained. 'But it isn´t easy. Do you and Basie want to surrender?'
'Like hell – though I don´t know about him. I´m trying to get Basie to buy a sampan so we
can sail upriver to Chungking. But Basie keeps changing his mind. He wants to stay in Shanghai
20 now the Japs are here. He thinks we can make a pile of money once we get to the camps.'
'Do you sell a lot of portholes, Frank?'
Frank peered at Jim, still unsure about this small boy.
'Kid we haven´t sold a single one. It´s Basie´s game, like a drug, he needs to keep people
working for him. Down in the yard somewhere he has a bag of gold teeth that he sells in
25 Hongkew.' With a knowing smile, Frank raised an oil-stained spanner, and touched Jim´s chin.
It´s a good thing you don´t have any gold teeth, or -' He snapped his wrist.
Jim sat up and remembered how Basie had searched his gums. The sound of the truck´s
motor vibrated through the metal cabin. He was wary of these two merchant seamen, who had
somehow escaped the Japanese net around Shanghai, and realized that he might have as much to
30 fear from them as from anyone else in the city. He thought of Basie´s secret bag of gold teeth.
The creeks and canals of Nantao were full of corpses, and the mouths of those corpses were full
of teeth. Every Chinese tried to have at least one gold tooth out of self-respect, and now that the
war had begun their relatives might be too tired to pull them out before the funeral. Jim
visualised the two American seamen searching the mud-flats at night with their spanners, Frank
35 rowing the dinghy along the black creeks. Basie in the bows with a lantern, prodding the corpses
that drifted past and exposing their gums . . .

From Empire of the Sun, by J G Ballard

40

3
Inglés Secundaria ©MELC,S.A. (MAGISTER) Práctico Parte B (Literatura)-November 2014

a. Discuss both the textual genre and the textual type to which this text belongs.

b. Comment on the communicative functions of the text.

c. Describe the style of the text.

d. Find figures of speech in the text.

e. Find the words/phrases in the text with the following meaning:

1) Behaving in a dishonest or indirect way, or tricking people, in order to get something:
2) A narrow area of water where the sea flows into the land:
3) To polish something with a soft cloth:
4) A metal tool with a specially shaped end for holding and turning nuts and bolts:
5) A small boat with a flat bottom used along the coast and rivers of China:

f. Write the phonological transcription of the following extract from the text above:

A hot, fishy breath filled his face. Jim awoke with a gasp. Frank´s huge body leaned across
him, heavy arms on his thighs, hands feeling in his blazer pockets. Jim pushed him away, and
Frank calmly returned to his deck-chair and continued to polish the portholes.

g. Does the text successfully recreate the chaos and dislocation that war generally causes?
Give evidence.

h. How does J G Ballard´s portrayal of Frank and Jim make us feel about them?
Give evidence.

3. LISTENING. Listen to an interview with Doctor Javid Abdelmoneim, a Flying Doctor who
has recently been working in South Sudan, and answer the following questions.

a. What special priviledge does Doctor Javid Abdelmoneim mention at the start of the
interview?

b. How would they spend the subsequent three to four days after arriving at a location?

4
Inglés Secundaria ©MELC,S.A. (MAGISTER) Práctico Parte B (Literatura)-November 2014

c. Are there any other NGOs operating in South Sudan? If so, what do they do?

d. Why is it important to build up a relationship of trust with the local population?

e. Why did they not establish permanent centres instead of operating as a flying team?

f. Summarise the main ideas of the interview in your own words.

4. USE OF ENGLISH.

A) WORD TRANSFORMATION. For questions 1-8, read the text below. Use the word given in
capitals at the end of some of the lines to form a word that fits in the space in the same line.
There is an example at the beginning.
All in a Word

For years 'bogus' was a word the British read in newspaper (0) headlines but LINE
tended not to say. Its popularity among the teenagers of America changed that,
although they didn´t use it with its original meaning. It came from California. Its
first appearance in print in 1834, was in the Daily Sketch of Dudesville, Nevada,
where it meant a machine for making (1) _________ of coins. Soon, those 'boguses' FORGE
were turning out ´bogus money' and the word had (2) _________ a change from GO
noun to adjective.

By the end of the 19th century, it was well established in Britain, applied to
anything false, spurious or intentionally (3) _________ . But the computer LEAD
scientists of 1960s America, to whom we owe so much (4) _________ innovation, LANGUAGE
redefined it to mean 'non-functional', 'useless', or 'unbelievable', especially in
relation to calculations and engineering ideas. This was followed by its (5) EMERGE
_________ among Princeton and Yale graduates in the East coast computer
community. But it was the (6) _________ of the word by American teeenagers ADOPT
generally who used it to mean simply 'bad', that led to it being widely used by their
counterparts in Britain.
INTEREST
(7)
_________ , 'bogus' is one of only about 1,250 English words for which no
sensible origin has emerged. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests a connection
with a New England word 'tantrobogus', meaning the devil. A rival US account CORRUPT
see, it as a (8) _________ of the name of a thief called Borghese or Borges.

5
Inglés Secundaria ©MELC,S.A. (MAGISTER) Práctico Parte B (Literatura)-November 2014

B) OPEN CLOZE. For questions 1-8, read the text below and think of the word which best fits
each space. Use only ONE word in each space. There is an example at the beginning (0).

Wheel It On!
It is nearly impossible in our post-industrial age to conceive(0) of a world without wheels.
(1)
From clocks to huge machinery and from cars to compact discs, _________ employs cogs, wheels
or other types of cylindrical components that spin on an axis. Yet the wheel took a relatively long
time to be invented and several civilisations reached a relatively high level of technological
sophistication (2) _________it. The most likely explanation is (3) _________ neither terrain nor
climate suited the wheel. Until 10,000 BC, much of the world was (4) _________ the grip of the last
vestiges of the Ice Age. (5) _________ was not under ice sheet was covered by desert, jungle or bog –
conditions obviously unsuited for something like a wheel.

Most experts agree that the wheel evolved (6) _________ the fact that Neolithic man was familiar with
moving heavy objects (7) _________ putting a roller, such as a tree trunk, under the load. (8)
_________ techniques were used to move huge stone blocks to build the pyramids around 2978 BC.

C) MULTIPLE-CHOICE: For questions 1-8, read the text below and decide which answer (A,
B, C or D) best fits each gap.

The Budding Novelist

'Your book´s not doing too well, I´ve heard.'

That had to be the (0) of the year. My novel had been rejected three times (1)____________
far. I´ve no doubt that behind my (2)___________ the family were having a good chuckle. Will of
course had been the loyal (3)____________, though I admit that his piteous expressions when the
thing limped home battered by franking stamps were harder to (4)___________ than his brother´s
outright sarcasm: 'Has your boomerang got back yet, Melvin?' he´d inquire, while his wife would
give the knife an extra twist by asking if I´d managed to sell any of my doodles. Which meant that
she presumed I´d (5)____________ my job as an electrician to pursue a career as an artist. Maybe I
should have. The manuscript had begun to show bruises from its days, weeks and months
(6)___________ in the inbox of various publishing firms. Actual criticism of the novel by its
rejectors was very (7)______________ on the ground, although the consensus of opinion seemed to
indicate that its main weakness (8)____________ in its apparent 'lack of novelty'.

0) A understatement B misinformation C incomprehension D distortion

1) A yet B thus C hence D by
2 A back B head C ears D face
3) A omission B exclusion C difference D exception
4) A bear B defy C cope D resist
5) A broken off B wound up C pulled out D packed in
6) A stationed B encased C buried D consigned
7) A light B shallow C thin D scant
8) A stood B revolved C lay D centred