English Reading Practice Test Level B1 - Test No. 10

Read the passage and answer these following questions. Wrigley’s Chewing Gum Wrigley’s chewing gum was actually developed as a premium to be given away with other Products rather than as a primary product for sale. As a teenager, William Wrigley Jr. was working for his father in Chicago selling soap that had been manufactured in his father’s factory. The soap was not very popular with merchants because it was priced at five cents, and this selling price did not leave a good profit margin for the merchants. Wrigley convinced his father to raise the price to ten cents and to give away cheap umbrellas as a premium for the merchants. This worked successfully, confirming to Wrigley that the use of premiums was an effective sales tool. Wrigley then established his own company; in his company he was selling soap as a wholesaler, giving baking soda away as a premium, and using a cookbook to promote each deal. Over time, the baking soda and cookbook became more popular than the soap, so Wrigley began a new operation selling baking soda. He began hunting for a new premium item to give away with sales of baking soda; he soon decided on chewing gum. Once again, when Wrigley realized that demand for the premium was stronger than the demand for the original product, he created the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company to produce and sell chewing gum.​ Wrigley started out with two brands of gum, Vassar and Lotta Gum, and soon introduced Juicy Fruit and Spearment. The latter two brands grew in popularity, while the first two were phased out. Juicy Fruit and Spearment are two of Wrigley’s main brands to this day.​

Read the passage and answer these following questions. Frank Gehry was once considered just another Southern California eccentric. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that he began receiving international acclaim as one of the world’s foremost architects. Outside the mainstream, his random designs have been so unique as to have defied categorization. In the late 1970s he was preoccupied with the notion of things in progress and his belief that buildings are most interesting when still unfinished. To give the impression of a structure in the state of construction, Gehry incorporated exposed studs and joinings, unpainted walls, and transparent skeletal framework in his buildings. In the early 1980s he explored the relation between space, structure, and light. Like the renderings of artists, Gehry’s work is very expressive. His close identity with painters and sculptors has inspired him to infuse his buildings with the qualities of immediacy, spontaneity, and improvisation. His fascination with textures and materials led him to experiment with the effect of combining different building materials, such as plywood, metal, and glass. While Gehry has achieved international prominence as one of the era’s most provocative and creative architects, he continues to experiment with form and structure. With his casual, intuitive approach to design, his buildings continue to demonstrate a high degree of freedom and invention. His work has inspired architects worldwide, who have taken his style and themes to cities around the globe.

Read the passage and answer these following questions. New World Epidemics A huge loss of life resulted from the introduction of Old World diseases into the Americas in the early sixteenth century. The inhabitants of the Americas were separated from Asia, Africa, and Europe by rising oceans following the Ice Ages, and, as a result, they were isolated by means of this watery barrier from numerous virulent epidemic diseases that had developed across the ocean, such as measles, smallpox, pneumonia, and malaria. Pre-Columbian Americans had a relatively disease-free environment but also lacked the antibodies needed to protect them from bacteria and viruses brought to America by European explorers and colonists. A devastating outbreak of disease that strikes for the first time against a completely unprotected population is known as a Virgin soil epidemic. Virgin soil epidemics contributed to an unbelievable decline in the population of native inhabitants of the Americas, one that has been estimated at as much as an 80 percent decrease of the native population in the centuries following the arrival of Europeans in the Americas.