Name: ______Per. _____
EAP Practice Reading Test Warm-Up Passages
*After you read the questions off the power point, read this passage, then answer the questions on this paper, then we will re-read this passage and give the correct answer. Please circle any context clues for the answers. You will get #2 points for each stamped warm up. If you are not here, you may not get the points or stamp.
EAP Warm-Up #1
Each year, millions of people visit the national parks of the American West, and they come for a variety of reasons. Some seek to explore the historical past. Others are looking for a short escape from the hot city or the crowded office or factory. Still others are trying to learn something about the mysteries of nature. Whatever their reason for visiting the parks, few leave disappointed.
EAP Warm-Up #2
Television today sits in the center of American homes and not too far from the center of American lives, a companionable though unsettling kind of house pet. Here and there, somebody will claim independence from it by announcing scornfully, "I never watch television!" or even, "I don't own a television set!" But such defiance matters little. You do not really need to have this pet in the house to be affected by it.
EAP Warm-Up #3-4
It cannot be said that San Francisco was ever a planned city. It simply grew. What saved it from complete chaos was its fortunate geographic location on a hilly peninsula. The surrounding waters, like the walls of old cities in Europe, confined its growth and forced its builders to face limitations in space. Although builders tried to ignore the hills and laid their gridirons of square blocks and rectangular lots over hill and valley alike, some hills were too steep to be so overrun. Thus, despite the indifference of its citizenry, San Francisco became a beautiful city, and because of the varied nature of its population, it became a cosmopolitan city. It has always been spared the uniformity and dullness of the small town.
EAP Warm-Up #5
A recent study showed that in twelve cases of computer-related embezzlement, the average take was one million dollars. With such rewards, computer crime seems destined to flourish, especially because the chances of detection are slim; embezzlers are discovered more often by coincidence than by internal safeguards.
EAP Warm-Up #6
By happy coincidence, jazz emerged as a major musical form in this century just at the time the phonograph was invented. Such composers of classical music as Mozart and Beethoven made detailed notations that, centuries later, enable us to reproduce their original music. Early African America jazz composers, on the other hand, often created their music as they performed it. If it were not for the modern invention of the phonograph, the music of these great pioneers of jazz would have been lost.
EAP Warm-Up #7
Those who specialize in the study of language claim that no two people speak a language in precisely the same way. An individual's version of a language is called an idiolect. Groups of speakers--separated from other groups by geographical, social, or economic barriers--also develop language habits peculiar to their own group. Such group differences are called dialects. Each person in a small town in Maine might speak his or her own idiolect, but the people of the town as a group will speak a dialect quite different from that spoken in a small town in Kentucky.
EAP Warm-Up #8
With all those vast mesas and canyons in the Southwest, you might think that finding a good desert resort would be a simple matter. Unfortunately, this is not the case. There are many mirages out there; during a recent trip, I saw scores of so-called desert resorts where cars outnumbered the cacti and neon outshone the stars.
EAP Warm-Up #9
Compared with such towering twentieth-century political figures as Mao Tse-tung, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill, Leonid Brezhnev seems destined to be remembered by the Western world as a secondary figure. Yet he achieved enormous stature within the former Soviet Union. He led the country during the period when it achieved the greatest strength and influence in its history. He was the first to be both chief of state and leader of the Communist party. He was acclaimed by his most immediate associates as Vozhd, "The Chief," a title even Lenin did not receive until after his death.
EAP Warm-Up #10
Chicken was once an expensive food in the United States, but because of the introduction of technology into farming it now costs one-fifth what it did in 1940. As is true in other sectors of high-tech farming, however, efficiency has inevitably been detrimental to the animals' well-being. According to critics, this most highly mechanized of all forms of agriculture in the United States has resulted in the inhumane treatment of chickens, disrupting important aspects of their life cycle, such as their rate of laying eggs.
EAP Warm-Up #11
The sudden invasion of California during the 1850's by an army of gold prospectors was a challenge too great for the established agencies of government. Like the settlers of many North American frontiers, the miners found it necessary to construct their own system of social control. The primary problem was regulation of the size, staking, working, and transfer of land claims. Each community drafted a simple set of rules and elected officials to administer them. In spite of local variations among the hundreds of mining districts so organized, there was an underlying consistency resulting from similar conditions and widespread imitation. These codes were the work of squatters and were therefore without legal authority. Yet they proved to be so effective that both the state and federal governments eventually accorded them recognition. Reproduced with little alteration on later mining frontiers, the claim law of California became almost universal in the American West.