Part III.

Listen to the following longer passages and then choose the best answer to each of the questions by blackening the corresponding circle. You may need to scribble a few notes in order to answer the questions satisfactorily. There are 20 questions in this part of the test, two points for each question.

Passage One

In early September, Trinidad's state-owned sugar company made all of its 9,200 employees redundant. Though most are Indo-Trinidadians and supporters of the island's truculent opposition party, there were no protests. The workers got redundancy pay totaling 115 million dollars, the offer of retraining, and the chance to continue growing cane as independent farmers in plots on the company's 31,000 hectares of farmland.

Trinidad, booming on oil and gas, has plenty of new jobs. Jamaica's stagnant economy is another story. The government privatized its sugar factories in 1994, but agreed to take them back four years later. Hit by floods and droughts, this year's sugar crop was a disaster. A shutdown might be greeted with riots by the 7,000 sugar workers and 8,000 cane farmers of the country. Barbados, prosperous and stable, has a different problem. Its neat cane fields are far more attractive to tourists than the eroded scrubland of Antigua, which stopped growing sugar 30 years ago.

21. What is the most appropriate title for the passage?

22. Which of the following statements is not true of Trinidadian workers who were made jobless in early September?

23. What happened to Jamaica's sugar factories in the 1990s?

24. What is happening to Barbados's sugar industry?

25. Which of the following statements best summarizes the main idea of the passage?

Passage Two

China and India have roughly the same population, but when it comes to mobile phones, there is no comparison between the two. In India, seven years after the launch of mobile-phone services, there are only 10 million users. In China, half that number signs up as new subscribers every month.

Geography and culture explain some of the differences. The concentration of economic activity in China's eastern coastal region gave its mobile operators big economies of scale, allowing lower prices. In China, telephones quickly came to be regarded as fashion items, something that has only recently happened to India.

But the main difference is regulation. India chose a licensing policy that divided the country into 22 regions, each with two licenses to operate mobile networks. Bidding in multiple regions was restricted. This aimed to promote competition, but led to a fragmented market with a baffling array of operators, none of which has economies of scale. Limited spectrum also hurt service quality.

26. Which is the most appropriate title for the passage?

27. According to the writer of this article, how many people sign up as new mobile phone subscribers in China every month?

28. Why are the prices of mobile telephone services lower in China's eastern coastal region?

29. Why are mobile phones popular in China, according to the speaker?

30. How does the speaker feel about the regulation of mobile services in India?