Test 3 READING PASSAGE 1 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-14, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below. Barbie Around the World Barbie started as a toy, the kind of toy that got whisked off store shelves faster than Mattel, the doll’s first maker. Now, thanks to Barbie, the world’s largest toy manufacturer can restock those shelves. Barbie's’star rose with post-war U:S. he- gemoriy that made everyone in the world want fast food, appliances, Coca-Cola, and, if you were a woman, blond hair, big breasts, impossibly long legs, and the latest in sunglasses and sports cars. Barbie never got pregnant, fat, or old. She stood her own in stores as the mute, brassy standard not just of beauty but of lifestyle. Around the world, she became an icon aspired to by both mothers and their daugh- ters; mothers and daughters who, no matter what size, shape, colour, language or culture, identified desperately with the rich, blond Barbie from that rich, blond coun- try. With their purchasing power they voted against their own perceived repulsive shapes, colours, and cultural identity. Barbie the bimbo, Barbie the liberated woman, it didn’t matter. Barbie found herself in the bizarre position of defining culture. While there have been significant and frequent Yankee Go Home uprisingé, wars of liberation, and all sorts of anti-imperial hatred spewed and spat at the United States = since it first asserted itself as a world power, there has been'no corresponding popu- lar movement against the Barbie culture. Book burnings, flag burnings, hostage tak- ing, terrorist bombs and hijacking, all were aimed to force the Yankee home forever. Barbie, however, maintained her hegemony. Barbie has not only survived the flames, but she has:also been rescued from them by women everywhere yearning to be free, beautiful, and cosmopolitan - just like Barbie. So tenacious is Barbie's popularity that government ministries of culture and moody consumer associations have stepped in with strategies to control or alter the appetites of their female citizens. Scanned with CamScannerIn Malaysia, the Consumers’ Association of Penanghas called for Barbie dolls to be banned outright. The doll’s blond, leggy and non-Asian appearance promotes the wrong aesthetics, they said. Also the Barbie doll does not encourage creativity and the use of imagination in children, because dolls are “fixed” and ready-made. The proposal immediately drew strong and angry reactions from the lacal press and mem- bers of the public, Whether this is because of‘doll demand or of public distaste for bureaucratic intervention in private consumption habits is open for debate. In Iran, the government condemned the ‘forever young dnd childless-by-choice Barbie (and her’ long-time boyfriend Ken. No plans for marriage ... ever.) as a threat to traditional culture. Barbie doesn’t define herself in relation to children or family as Iranian women ‘supposedly do. Banning the pair hasn’t worked, so the government has come up with a pair of its own, allegedly more suited to Iranian culture. Sara and Dara, who are brother sind sister, were designedvand marketed by the government= Spoitsored Amusement Department of the Institiitftor the Intellectual Development of Children ind Young Adults. Meanwhile, Barbie doils openly sell for $700 in Teheran ‘stores, Even though $700-is seven times the av average monthly salary in Iran, the tall, blond, saucy, freewheeling Barbie sells briskly. During an era‘when the world is seeking to reclaim. its cultures, Mattel has done its entrepreneurial share to churn out miilticuttural ‘dolls to counter the criticism ‘that Barbie is. too one-dimensional in her tall ‘blondness. After all, if only 15 percent of ‘American women are natural blond, how many could there possibly be in the world? Not that Mattel has targeted these brown, black, yellow Barbies to an international audience reflecting those: skin tones; Mattel’s marketing has been. to young girls, pre- sumably white girls’in suburbs who can now play with Japanese, Mexican, and Indian Barbies, and “learn more about history and different cultures”. : ‘The brilliance of Mattel’s co-optation of criticism is that Mattel retained Barbie's idealized image of beauty. Yes, consumers.can now buy darker-haired, darker-skinned Barbies but without the ethnic features that distinguish the darker-skinned women of the world. ‘The fact that Mexican Barbie Is’ brown may be even more insidious if Mexican girls think they must grow up to be tall, thin, buxom, and leggy. African- American Barbies have lighter skin than most of the black population, playing into an often-heard complaint of black women that the lighter their skin, the more attractive thev are. Scanned with CamScannercee RO matter what her colour, continues to be clothed in attire that pro- indy, swinging, Independently wealthy lifestyle. Take, for example, the ‘scent line of Fillpina Barble dolls, She's called “Philippine Island Barbie”. She's dark- halred with darker skin tones and dressed in formiting gowns with the Maria Clara butterfly sleeves, She lives juxtaposed in a country with an annual per capita income of $US 580, Nor do the best-selling Barbies smile any more. After all, the toothy-grinned Bar- ble of yesterday falls to capture the “mystique” of today’s modern woman. No mat- ter what their culture or colour, how heavy or slim, women around the world wil be laced into the corset of the beauty myth If Barbie is their symbol of freedom. If Barbie seems to be free, maybe it’s because doors open for that certain woman who 's impossibly tall, impossibly blond, who always wears the right outfit, and keeps her mouth shut. Ean Complete the table below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 1-7 on your answer sheet. ‘America | Barbiehas1.____hair. | Only 2. of American | 1 | | women were born blond. | | - nee i | : _ Malaysia | Stops 3. and || Resulted in 5. reactions | 4, | rom the publi Iran | Threatens 6. ot | Barbie can be bought for 7. Scanned with CamScanneres Answer the questions below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 8-11 on your answer sheet. 8. Who saved Barbie from burning? 9. What did Mattel change to appear more in line with multiculturalism? 10. What makes dark-skinned Barbies free from distinguishing the darker-skinned women around the world? 11. What doesn't Barbie do any more? OMe) MANS ae oS CR eR nee osmenet Cd 12. Barbie's relationship with Ken was a threat to the Iranian lifestyle. 13. Most American women look like Barbie. Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D. Write your answer in box 14 on your answer sheet. 14. Why did the writer write this? A. to say how popular Barbie is B to say that Barbie is a bad role model C to say that Barbie represents freedom D to say how good Mattel is at marketing Barbie Scanned with CamScannerREADING PASSAGE 2 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 15-27, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below. Economic Apartheid Kills A new report from the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University shows that wealth creation is remarkably, one might say, criminally, unequal, Follow this hierarchy at the top of the wealth pyramid: the richest 1 percent of adults alone owned 40 percent of global assets in the year 2000; the richest 2 percent owned more than half of global household wealth; and the richest 10 percent of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. That leaves very little for the remaining 90 percent of the global population. Could it be any worse? Yes, the rich are still getting richer, more millionaires are becoming billionaires. As to the world’s lower class: the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1 percent of global wealth, defined as net worth: the value of physical and finan- cial assets less debts. Over a billion poor people subsist on less than one dollar a day. Every day, according to UNICEF, 30,000 children die due to poverty - that’s over 10 mil- lion children killed by poverty every year! Global economic apartheid is killing people. Here are data showing some of the variations among nations. Average wealth amounted to $144,000 per person. in the U.S. in 2000, not as good as the $181,000 in Japan, but better than most others: $127,000 for the U.K., $70,000 for Denmark, $37,000 for New Zealand, 1,400 in Indonesia and $1,100 in India. Averages, of course, are very As to wealth inequality, the richest 10 percent of people in the U.S. have 70 percent of the wealth, compared to 40 percent in China. In other words, China has much more economic equality, though that is changing quickly. To be among the richest 10 percent of adults in the world required $61,000 in net wealth, and more than $500,000 was needed to belong to the richest 1 percent, a group with 37 million members worldwide according to the study. Recall, all these data are for 2000 and would be much higher now because of the steady trend of the rich becoming richer. Scanned with CamScannerThe statistical measure of inequality is the Gini value, which measures inequality ona scale from zero (total equality) to one (complete inequality). For income, it ranges from .35 to .45 in most countries. Wealth inequality is usually much greater, typically between .65 and .75. This reflects the greater difficulty in accumulating wealth (capital) than increasing income. Two high wealth economies, Japan and the United States, show very different patterns of wealth inequality, with Japan having a low wealth Gini of 55 and the U.S. having around .80. The incomes of the top fifth of the Japanese population are only three times that of the bottom fifth, compared to nine times in the U.S. Japan has little economic apartheid compared to the U.S. Yet both countries have a huge number of wealthy people. Of the wealthiest 10 percent in the world, 25 percent are American and 20 percent are Japanese. These two countries are even stronger among the richest 1 percent of individuals in the world, with 37 percent residing in the U.S. and 27 percent in Japan. The point is that despite high numbers of very wealthy people, economic apartheid is absent in Japan and abysmal in.the U.S. We can explain the difference between Japan and the U.S. People can save and ac- cumulate wealth for future economic secutity, or can borrow and spend like-mad to ac- cumulate possessions. According to a 2006 report, oflly 41 percent of American families save regularly, making wealth creation difficult. America’s national savings rate - which includes corporate savings and government budget deficits - is only about 13.6% of gross domestic product, compared to 25 percent in Japan. Global wealth inequality is higher still. The study estimates that the global wealth Gini for adults is 0.89. The same degree of inequality would be obtained if one person in a group of ten takes 99 percent of the total pie and the other nine share the remaining 1 percent. To a limited degree, elitist powers can engineer modest improvements in in- come among the global poor, but stark wealth inequality will probably worsen, consider- ing the political power of the rich. As worldwide communications increasingly make the obnoxious wealth of the upper class more visible, even modest increases in income are unlikely to satisfy the vast majority of the global population without wealth. U.S. economic apartheid shows that a self-proclaimed great democracy with con- siderable personal freedoms can risk deep social instability from class warfare as it ap- proaches a two-class system. We need to see economic apartheid as lethal and repulsive as racial apartheid. Scanned with CamScannerComplete the table below. Choose NO MORE THAN ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer. Write your answers in boxes 15-17 on your answer sheet. Global Household Wealth Sean | 40% on 15. | More than 50% 10% Bottom half of world adult | population Complete the table below. Choose NO MORE THAN ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer. , Write your answers in boxes 18-23°0n your answer sheet, "Average Wealth $1,100 7 ___.-—-. | $181,000 IELTS The Complete Guide to Academic Reading - 141 Scanned with CamScanner: Questions. 24727: Complete the table below. Choose NO MORE THAN ONE WORD AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer. i Write your answers in boxes 24-27 on your answer sheet. Lenin } Wealth Gini | Wealthiest 10% | Wealthiest 1% eT RN mou -§ i j in Taney PRUCR CCM MC STU RCRCOum uy Scanned with CamScannerREADING PASSAGE 3 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 28-40 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below, The Chicken Tikka Masala Story Organisers of National Cuny Week claim that if all the portions sold in one Year in the UK were stacked on top of each other, they would constitute a tikka tower 2,770 times taller than the Greenwich Millennium Dome and yet in an article in The Daily Telegraph in November 1999, journalist Amit Roy referred to it as “a dish which does not exist in Indian cuisine”. So the question is "Is it a genuine Indian dish or isn’t it?” ‘The name of this enigma? Chicken Tikka Masala: the flagship dish of Britain's newly acclaimed ‘national cuisine’, boasting a huge 14.6% of the sales of the al- most half a million curries consumed, on average, in the restaurants and homes of the United Kingdom every day of the year, Chicken Tikka Masala, ot CTM as it was affectionately dubbed by writer Colleen Grove in ‘Spice n Easy Magazine’ in November 1994, is one of those culinary fables that lend a touch of intrigue and excitement to an already exotic cuisin®, Amit Roy was quite correct {9 observe that the dish does not hail from India and that it was specifically created to appeal to the British palate by some very astute restaurateurs. This much is not in doubt but when one moves on to the his- tory of the dish, fact becomes fiction and depends on just who one talks to, No ‘Indian’ chef seems to have produced any real evidence that he or she first invented the dish and it is commonly thought that its invention came about almost by accident. Journalist and restaurateur Iqbal Wabhab claims it was cre- ated when a Bangladeshi chef produced a dish of traditional Chicken Tikka only to be asked “Where's my gravy?” The response was, ‘Supposedly, a can of cream of tomato soup and.a few spices and the ‘masala’ element was born. Top food writer Charles Campion refers to CTM as “a dish invented in Lon- don in the Seventies so that the ignorant could have gravy with their chicken tikka. Several chefs have made claim to the invention of CTM but none with any www.nhantrivietcom IELTS The Complete Guide to Academic Reading ~ 143 Scanned with CamScannerevidence or witness support so the mystery will have to remain. The descendants of Sultan Ahmed Ansari, who owned the Taj Mahal in Glasgow, claim he invent. ed it in the 1950s, but there is no other evidence of the dish at this early date or of the tandoor in Glasgow. / ‘The tandoor, which boosted tikka sales, had not even arrived in Britain at that time, having only been introduced to the first Indian restaurant, Moti Mahal, in New Delhi in 1948. In fact this can be seen as the birth of CFM in its original form of Butter Chicken. Lala Kundan Lal Gujral first set up in Peshawar in 1920 bbut cathe to Delhi in 1947 to set tip Moti Mahal. He worked with a local man to produce the first restaurant version of the tandoor and invented a tandoori spice SE Ee pepper. ole ee Called Murg Makhani in Hindi, Butter Chicken originated in the 1950s at the Moti Mahal restaurant in Old Delhi. Famed for its Tandoori Chicken, the cooks there’ used to recycle the leftover chi¢ken juices in the marinade trays by adding butter and tomato, This sauce was then tossed around with the tandoor-cooked chicken pieces and presto - Butter Chicken was ready! The leftover dish appealed to Delhites and was quickly lapped up by the rest of the world. | So impressed was India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru by Kundan Lal's dishes that Moti Mahal became a permanent fixture’in-all his state ban- quets. Legend has it that when former Soviet’ premier Nikita Kruschev was asked what he liked about India, he repliéd “Taj Mahal and Moti Mahal”. When the Shah of Iran came on a state visit to India, the Indian Education Minister Maulana Azad told him that coming to Delhi without eating at Moti Mahal was. like going to Agra and not seeing the Taj Mahal. : ‘Top restaurateur Amin Ali, owner of The Red Fort and Soho Spicé in London's Soho, remembers serving CTM when he first arrived in London in 1974, A lowly Waiter at the time he remembers wondering just what the'dish ‘was. - Certainly one family to have tangible benefits from the success of CTM is that of Sheik Abdul Khalique, who owns The Polash in Shoebuiyness which opened in 1979. His father, Haji Abdul Razah, returned to Bangiadesh in’ 1985 having made sufficient profit to build The‘Polash Hotel in Sylhet. A‘mosque and The 144 IELTS The Complete Guide to Academic Reading www nhantrivietcom™ Scanned with CamScannerPolash i far fi Sheba Charitable Trust were added after his death. The family firmly claim (01 tunes are largely down to CIM, the mysterious Indian /British hybrid. CTM was introduced to Wi ie United States and by the ledged as the Most popular aitrose by G. K. Noon in 1983 when he was still in end of the Millennium, it was generally acknow- ° single dish in Britain. For something that is so popular with the public and with the restaurateurs who make their living from it, Chicken Tikka Masala is very much a Cinderella of culinary creations. Very few Tecipes for CTM appear in the plethora of Indian Cuisine cookbooks that have appeared over the last twenty years and Alan Da- vidson's recent ‘Oxford Companion to Food' does not even consider it deserving of a listing. Indeed, such are the passions it generates in the industry that many top chefs refuse to cook or serve it due to its complete ‘lack of authenticity’. Mridula Baljekar is one of the few cookery writers to have included CTM in her bestselling ‘Complete Indian Cookbook’ (1993) including food colouring and tomato puree, as well as double cream and almonds. Chef Mohammed Moneer introduces yet another ingredient with half a cup of coconut milk instead of cream. Chicken Tikka Masala was most certaiily invented in Britain, probably by a Bangladeshi chef, and is so popular it is even being served in some hotel restaur- ants in India and Bangladesh. IfYjoes not come from the Raj or the kitchens of the Moghul Emperors, but millions of people enjoy it every year and perhaps that is all the pedigree it needs! Scanned with CamScannerQuestions 8s. Use the information in the text to match the people (listed A-H) with who said what and who was responsible for which action. : Write the correct letters (A-H) in boxes 28-35 on your answer sheet. Who said 28, Chicken Tikka Masala was first made by a chef from Bangladesh? 29. he liked two things about India? 30. it was made to suit British taste? 31. if you go to Agra, you should see the Taj Mahal? Who was responsible for 32. introducing it to Waitrose? 33. christening it CTM? . 34, building a mosque? 35. replacing one of the ingredients? NAGE marare Bien ecnken Nicaea fohamme a aN NTN Seva ee Amit Roy Fees HTN an aes Scanned with CamScannerChoose the correct letter, A, B, or C. Write the correct letters in boxes 36-40 on your answer sheet. 36. 37. 38. 39. How many people claim to have invented CTM? A none B several C only one © ‘When was tandoor first cooked in a restaurant? A 1950s B 1920 Cc 1948 How many Indian cookbooks have been written over the last two decades? A alot B afew C about twenty ‘Where does Chicken Tikka Masala come from? A Britain : B Bangladesh C the Raj Why was this article written? A to promote Chicken Tikka Masala B_ to explain the mystery surrounding the origin of CTM C_ to explain how it was invented Scanned with CamScanner