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Practice Test: Reading – Part 6 (Gapped Text) | B2 First (FCE)

Level: B2
Exam:
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B2 First (FCE) Reading – Part 6 : Test
B2 First (FCE) Reading – Part 6 : Tips & Strategy

Part 6 consists of one text, for example, an extract from a magazine, from which six sentences have been removed and placed in jumbled order after the text, together with a seventh sentence which does not fit in any of the gaps. Candidates are required to decide from where in the text each sentence has been removed. Each sentence may be used only once, and there is one sentence that candidates do not need to use.

The task tests understanding of how texts are structured. Rather than concentrating on individual sentences, candidates need to be able to follow the development of ideas, opinions and events through the text as a whole, using their understanding of text coherence and cohesion devices.

B2 First (FCE) Reading – Part 6 : Test

Self Driving Cars

As self-driving cars move from fiction to reality, a philosophical problem has emerged. The classic case of a runaway rail carriage hurtling down tracks towards a group of five oblivious people.

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On the first one, the carriage kills five people, and on the other it kills only one person. What do you do?

Although the parameters can be adjusted, the problem is essentially the same. What if the five people are all over the age of 80 and the one person is under 20?

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You get the idea. So what has this got to do with self driving cars?

Let’s replace the runaway rail carriage with a self driving car.

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What if, rather than picking between the lives of five people and one person on different roads, you had to pick between the life of the car’s sole occupant, and the lives of five pedestrians?

Would you buy a car if you knew it was programmed to swerve into a tree to protect someone who crossed the road without looking?

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It found that the majority of people would avoid buying self-driving cars as a result. That, of course, would result in far more deaths in the long run, as the endless deaths at the hands of incapable human drivers would continue.

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In all their testing, they have yet to encounter a situation where you have to pick between the baby stroller or the grandmother. Even if they did see a scenario like that, it would mean they had made a mistake a couple of seconds earlier.

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Slam on the brakes, stupid!

You are the programmer who has to design the software to react to such situations.The problem applies to all models.The obvious solution is clear to them.The engineers who face these dilemas in real life are perplexed by this debate.You have to choose between two tracks.A recent paper in the journal Science discussed some research on the subject.What if the five people are in fact five hundred kittens?
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B2 First (FCE) Reading – Part 6 : Tips & Strategy

Tips:

Tip 1: Be careful…

Sometimes there won’t be a clue in the sentence immediately before or after the gap.

You really do need to read the whole text to get its meaning – sometimes the ‘clue’ is the entire paragraph.

Tip 2: Underline reference words…

Underline the names of people, organisations or places. Also, underline reference words such as ‘this’, ‘it’, ‘there’, etc. They will help you see connections between sentences and paragraphs.

Strategy

  1. Read the main text through first to get an idea of what it is about and how the writer develops his or her subject matter.
  2. Use clues in the paragraphs before and after the gaps to help you choose the ones that fit.
  3. Clues may lie in the grammar, punctuation and/or vocabulary.
  4. Try to guess the sort of information that might be missing.
  5. Check any phrases/short sentences which you have not used to see if they could fit in the gap.
  6. When you have finished the task, read through the completed text to make sure it makes sense
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