Review Test 1 — Homework

1 You will hear a telephone conversation between the organiser of a short story competition and someone who wishes to take part in the competition.

2 A: Good morning, Dave speaking. B: Oh hi, I'm phoning about a short story competition. Um, I saw an advert in a magazine and I was just calling to get some details. A: Yes, certainly.

3 I'm the competition organiser, so I should be able to help. What kind of details are you looking for? B: Well, um, does it cost anything to enter? A: Yes, there's an entry fee of five pounds.

4 B: OK, that should be fine. It's a short story competition, so how many words is that? A: Well, we want to give people a reasonable amount of freedom, but the guidelines are around 3,000 words.

5 B: Oh, that sounds quite a lot. A: Well, it's not as much as it used to be. We did have a limit of 5,000 words, but some people thought that was too many, so this year we've reduced it.

6 B: Right, and does the story need to be about anything in particular? A: No, you can write about any topic you like. But the main point of the competition is that it has to have a surprise ending.

7 B: Oh I see. That sounds interesting. I don't think I've ever written a story like that before. A: Yes, it's something we've introduced for this year's competition. B: Right. Um, I'm 18.

8 Is there any age limit? A: Yes, you need to be 16 or over, so if you're 18, that's fine. B: Great. So you have the competition once a year. Is that right? A: Yes, we start advertising in January, and the competition takes up a lot of the year.

9 We give people a few months to write their story, and then it takes quite a long time to judge all the entries and to announce the winners. B: I see. So when is the closing date for the competition?

10 It's already April. I hope I'm not too late. A: No, you've still got plenty of time. You need to submit your entry by the 1st of August. After then it will be too late, although you can always enter next year's competition.

11 B: OK, good. So how do I enter? A: Well, we have a website, and the best way to enter is to complete the entry form online. We also have more details of the competition on the site.

12 Shall I give you the web address? B: Yes, please. A: OK, it's www.comp4ss.com. B: OK, thanks. I've got that. So I can complete the entry form online, but how do I send the story? Do I print it out and send it to you?

13 A: Well, you may want to print the story out so you can review it, but don't post it to us. When you've finished your story, you will need to email it to us. The email address is on the website I gave you.

14 [Questions 7–10]

15 B: Can you tell me a bit about how the competition is judged and what the prizes are? A: Yes, of course. Well, once we have all the entries, I send them to all the judges. Our competition is quite popular, so we are lucky to be able to use famous authors who are very interested in the competition.

16 B: That's fantastic! It's great to know that someone famous will be reading my story. A: Yes, that's right. It takes them quite a while to read through the entries, but eventually they decide on the top five stories.

17 B: I see. And what happens then? A: Well, they will be published online so everyone can read them. They will not be in any order at this point. They will just be the five stories that the judges think are the best.

18 B: And do all the top five stories get prizes? A: No, it's just the top story and the runner-up. So how is the top story decided? A: Well, once the top five stories are available, it will be the public who will vote for their favourite story.

19 B: Right, I see. So I need to get all my friends to vote for me then. A: Yes, that's a good idea. And what is the prize? A: Well, the runner-up gets a prize of £300, but the winner gets a trip to Spain to attend a workshop for writers.

1 A. In recent times developing commercial revenues has become more challenging for airports due to a combination of factors, such as increased competition from Internet shopping, restrictions on certain sales, such as tobacco, and new security procedures that have had an impact on the dwell time of passengers. Moreover, the global economic downturn has caused a reduction in passenger numbers while those that are travelling generally have less money to spend. This has meant that the share of revenue from non-aeronautical revenues actually peaked at 54% at the turn of the century and has subsequently declined slightly. Meanwhile, the pressures to control the level of aeronautical revenues are as strong as ever due to the poor financial health of many airlines and the rapid rise of the low-cost carrier sector.

2 B. Some of the more obvious solutions to growing commercial revenues, such as extending the merchandising space or expanding the variety of shopping opportunities, have already been tried to their limit at many airports. A more radical solution is to find new sources of commercial revenue within the terminal, and this has been explored by many airports over the last decade or so. As a result, many terminals are now much more than just shopping malls and offer an array of entertainment, leisure, and beauty and wellness facilities. At this stage of facilities provision, the airport also has the possibility of taking on the role of the final destination rather than merely a facilitator of access.

3 C. At the same time, airports have been developing and expanding the range of services that they provide specifically for the business traveller in the terminal. This includes offering business centres that supply support services, meeting or conference rooms and other space for special events. Within this context, Jarach (2001) discusses how dedicated meeting facilities located within the terminal and managed directly by the airport operator may be regarded as an expansion of the concept of airline lounges or as a way to reconvert abandoned or underused areas of terminal buildings. Previously it was primarily airport hotels and other facilities offered in the surrounding area of the airport that had the potential to take on this role and become active as a business space (McNeill, 2009).

4 D. When an airport location can be promoted as a business venue, this may increase the overall appeal of the airport and help it become more competitive in both attracting and retaining airlines and their passengers. In particular, the presence of meeting facilities could become one of the determining factors taken into consideration when business people are choosing airlines and where they change their planes. This enhanced attractiveness itself may help to improve the airport operator's financial position and future prospects, but clearly this will be dependent on the competitive advantage that the airport is able to achieve in comparison with other venues.

5 E. In 2011, an online airport survey was conducted and some of the areas investigated included the provision and use of meeting facilities at airports and the perceived role and importance of these facilities in generating income and raising passenger numbers. In total, there were responses from staff at 154 airports and 68% of these answered 'yes' to the question: Does your airport own and have meeting facilities available for hire? The existence of meeting facilities therefore seems high at airports. In addition, 28% of respondents that did not have meeting facilities stated that they were likely to invest in them during the next five years. The survey also asked to what extent respondents agreed or disagreed with a number of statements about the meeting facilities at their airport. 49% of respondents agreed that they have put more investment into them during recent years; 41% agreed that they would invest more in the immediate future. These are fairly high proportions considering the recent economic climate.

6 F. The survey also asked airports with meeting facilities to estimate what proportion of users are from the local area, i.e. within a 90-minute drive from the airport, or from abroad. Their findings show that meeting facilities provided by the majority of respondents tend to serve local versus non-local or foreign needs. 63% of respondents estimated that over 60% of users are from the local area. Only 3% estimated that over 80% of users are from abroad. It is therefore not surprising that the facilities are of limited importance when it comes to increasing use of flights at the airport: 16% of respondents estimated that none of the users of their meeting facilities use flights when travelling to or from them, while 56% estimated that 20% or fewer of the users of their facilities use flights.

7 G. The survey asked respondents with meeting facilities to estimate how much revenue their airport earned from its meeting facilities during the last financial year. Average revenue per airport was just $12,959. Meeting facilities are effectively a non-aeronautical source of airport revenue. Only 1% of respondents generated more than 20% non-aeronautical revenue from their meetings facilities; none generated more than 40%. Given the focus on local demand, it is not surprising that less than a third of respondents agreed that their meeting facilities support business and tourism development in their home region or country.

8 H. The findings of this study suggest that few airports provide meeting facilities as a serious commercial venture. It may be that, as owners of large property, space is available for meeting facilities at airports and could play an important role in serving the needs of the airport, its partners, and stakeholders such as government and the local community. Thus, while the local orientation means that competition with other airports is likely to be minimal, competition with local providers of meetings facilities is likely to be much greater.

1 This may seem a pointless question today. Surrounded as we are by thousands of photographs, most of us take for granted that, in addition to supplying information and seducing customers, camera images also serve as decoration, afford spiritual enrichment, and provide significant insights into the passing scene. But in the decades following the discovery of photography, this question reflected the search for ways to fit the mechanical medium into the traditional schemes of artistic expression.

2 The much-publicized pronouncement by painter Paul Delaroche that the daguerreotype* signalled the end of painting is perplexing because this clever artist also forecast the usefulness of the medium for graphic artists in a letter written in 1839. Nevertheless, it is symptomatic of the swing between the outright rejection and qualified acceptance of the medium that was fairly typical of the artistic establishment. Discussion of the role of photography in art was especially spirited in France, where the internal policies of the time had created a large pool of artists, but it was also taken up by important voices in England. In both countries, public interest in this topic was a reflection of the belief that national stature and achievement in the arts were related.

3 From the maze of conflicting statements and heated articles on the subject, three main positions about the potential of camera art emerged. The simplest, entertained by many painters and a section of the public, was that photographs should not be considered 'art' because they were made with a mechanical device and by physical and chemical phenomena instead of by human hand and spirit; to some, camera images seemed to have more in common with fabric produced by machinery in a mill than with handmade creations fired by inspiration. The second widely held view, shared by painters, some photographers, and some critics, was that photographs would be useful to art but should not be considered equal in creativeness to drawing and painting. Lastly, by assuming that the process was comparable to other techniques such as etching and lithography, a fair number of individuals realized that camera images were or could be as significant as handmade works of art and that they might have a positive influence on the arts and on culture in general.

4 Artists reacted to photography in various ways. Many portrait painters — miniaturists in particular — who realized that photography represented the 'handwriting on the wall' became involved with daguerreotyping or paper photography in an effort to save their careers; some incorporated it with painting, while others renounced painting altogether. Still other painters, the most prominent among them the French painter, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, began almost immediately to use photography to make a record of their own output and also to provide themselves with source material for poses and backgrounds, vigorously denying at the same time its influence on their vision or its claims as art.

5 The view that photographs might be worthwhile to artists was enunciated in considerable detail by Lacan and Francis Wey. The latter, an art and literary critic, who eventually recognised that camera images could be inspired as well as informative, suggested that they would lead to greater naturalness in the graphic depiction of anatomy, clothing, likeness, expression, and landscape. By studying photographs, true artists, he claimed, would be relieved of menial tasks and become free to devote themselves to the more important spiritual aspects of their work.

6 Wey left unstated what the incompetent artist might do as an alternative, but according to the influential French critic and poet Charles Baudelaire, writing in response to an exhibition of photography in 1859, lazy and untalented painters would become photographers. Fired by a belief in art as an imaginative embodiment of cultivated ideas and dreams, Baudelaire regarded photography as 'a very humble servant of art and science'; a medium largely unable to transcend 'external reality'. For this critic, photography was linked with 'the great industrial madness' of the time, which in his eyes exercised disastrous consequences on the spiritual qualities of life and art.

7 Eugene Delacroix was the most prominent of the French artists who welcomed photography as help-mate but recognized its limitations. Regretting that such a wonderful invention had arrived so late in his lifetime, he still took lessons in daguerreotyping, and both commissioned and collected photographs. Delacroix's enthusiasm for the medium can be sensed in a journal entry noting that if photographs were used as they should be, 'an artist might raise himself to heights that we do not yet know'.

8 The question of whether the photograph was document or art aroused interest in England also. The most important statement on this matter was an unsigned article that concluded that while photography had a role to play, it should not be 'constrained' into competition with art; a more stringent viewpoint led critic Philip Gilbert Hamerton to dismiss camera images as 'narrow in range, emphatic in assertion, telling one truth for ten falsehoods'.

9 These writers reflected the opposition of a section of the cultural elite in England and France to the 'cheapening of art' which the growing acceptance and purchase of camera pictures by the middle class represented. Technology made photographic images a common sight in the shop windows of Regent Street and Piccadilly in London and the commercial boulevards of Paris. In London, for example, there were at the time some 130 commercial establishments where portraits, landscapes, and photographic reproductions of works of art could be bought. This appeal to the middle class convinced the elite that photographs would foster a desire for realism instead of idealism, even though some critics recognized that the work of individual photographers might display an uplifting style and substance that was consistent with the defining characteristics of art.

10 * the name given to the first commercially successful photographic images