Paragraph Completion Advanced Level Test – Quiz

The olive is possibly the most important fruit of the Mediterranean and Near Eastern region so much that according to Greek mythology, it helped to give Athens its name. This was because when the gods Poseidon and Athena clashed over whose name the city would get, it was decided that the honour would
go to the one who could offer the most precious gift to it. _____ . The olive even gets important mentions in the religious books of the area. According to the Bible, after Noah's Ark is left high and stranded on a mountain, he sent out a dove, and when it returned with an olive leaf in its mouth, Noah knew that God's wrath had passed.

Supermarket managers have all kinds of tricks to encourage people to spend more money. Their aim is to make customers go more slowly through the supermarket. _____. They also make the corridors near the cash registers more narrow. Then customers with large shopping carts will get stuck or have to
slow down. In some supermarkets, the floor is even slightly uphill for people going towards the exits.

Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires on 24 August 1899. His father was a lawyer, a psychology teacher, and an anarchist who was part of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and British, while his mother was a translator of Spanish and Catalan descent. At his home, both Spanish and English were spoken. _____. And in fact, he learned to read in English before Spanish. He grew up in a suburb of Buenos Aires called Palermo, in a large house with a comprehensive library, for which he began writing stories at the age of 6.

_____ . In Western medicine, all the ingredients are single compounds, making it much easier to quality control, and the mode of function can be analyzed. In Chinese medicine, howewer, because it is a mixture that is used, it is very difficult to investigate how it works. One of the ways that pharmaceutical
companies are looking at bringing traditional Chinese medicine into line with Western Standards is to identifiy the active ingredients in the herbs that are used.

The degree to which children feel more self-confident as they grow older depends mainly on their relation with their mothers and fathers. Children always need to be reassured by their parents. _____. This kind of trust is essential in reducing young children's anxiety.

Lichens are one of the few kinds of life that can survive in the mountains of Antarctica. These tiny plants live in small holes in the rocks. Outside, the extreme cold and strong winds do not allow any life at all. _____. However, much of the time they are frozen. This fact means that the lichen function very slowly, and live a very long time.

It's essential for all creatures to keep themselves clean and free from parasites. _____. Some species are able to clean themselves. For those species that are not, it is obviously vital to find some other animal to perform this cleaning function.

Money has not always been made of metal or paper. In many parts of the world, people have used other materials. Precious stones, valuable cloth (silk), and rare spices (saffron) have all been used as money at times. But people have also given special value to other kinds of objects. For example, in Ethiopia,
blocks of salt have been used as money. _____. In India and in North America, special kinds of shells have been used

_____. This expression can be true in a very literal sense. The Luo people from Kenya often cook and eat the leaves of a plant called black nightshade. This plant serves as an effective treatment for many stomach problems. The Luo eat it regularly from childhood and do not suffer any negative effect from
it. However, when one American researcher ate just a small amount, she felt quite ill afterwards. In fact, the plant contains a substance called solanine that can be poisonous.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was a basketball star in the United States. When he was born in New York City in 1947, his parents named him Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor, Jr. He studied at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in the late 1960s. At that time, he led the university's basketball team to three
championships. _____. He changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. In 1969, Kareem began his professional basketball career as a centre on the Milwaukee Bucks team. Later, in 1975, he joined the Los Angeles Lakers.

Sociologists and psychologists have argued for centuries about how a person's character is formed. The argument has long been known as “Nature versus Nurture”, for the two main opposing theories. The first theory says that character is formed genetically before birth. _____. The other theory says,
on the contrary, that a person's character is formed after birth.

A virus can be regarded as a self-replicating program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents in computer technology. ______. Extending this comparison, the insertion of the virus into a program is termed “infection”, and the infected document or code is known as a “host”.

_____. Within five years, 4,5 million Americans had taken it at least once. This was the fastest acceptance ever for a psychiatric drug. It seemed to go beyond treating illness and actually improve people's lives; a sort of facelift for the character. However, reports emerged that some patients actually felt more suicidal on Prozac.

The author Alfred Jarry is best known for his play King Ubu, in which the title character is a gross satire on bourgeois stupidity and greed. In fact, the character became so famous at the time that Jarry himself often pretended he was Ubu, especially in his later years. _____. He was, for example, the inventor of an “imaginary science” known as “pataphysics” and he also wrote an essay about a time travel machine.

Ocean waves may seem like a fanciful source of energy. _____. In August, a 750-kilowatt power plant off the coast of Scotland began delivering ocean - wave power for the first time to the local electricity grid. The plant consists of four linked floating cylinders which use wave motion to drive a hydraulic pump and turn a turbine. This is such an inexpensive and clean process that engineers are quite optimistic about its future.