HIGH TECH: CRIME OF THE FUTURE

NASA breach update: Stolen laptop had data on 10,000 users

Breached unencrypted laptop puts personal data of NASA employees and contractors at risk, spokesman says
Computerworld - Personally identifiable information of "at least" 10,000 NASA employees and contractors remains at risk of compromise following last month's theft of an agency laptop, a spokesman told Computerworld via email Thursday.

Agency employees had been told of the October 31 theft of a laptop containing the personal data from a locked car in an email message Tuesday from Richard Keegan Jr., associate deputy administrator at NASA.

In the email, Keegan told employees that the stolen laptop contained sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) on a large number of NASA employees, contractors and others. Unspecified NASA documents were also stolen from the car, he added.

"Although the laptop was password protected, it did not have whole disk encryption software, which means the information on the laptop could be accessible to unauthorized individuals," Keegan warned employees in the email.
Responding to questions from Computerworld today, NASA spokesman Allard Beutel acknowledged that agency waited nearly two weeks to publicly disclose the breach. He said that in the interim, NASA was working with law enforcement personnel to recover the laptop, and was working to determine exactly whose personal data was stored on it.

"NASA immediately began working with local law enforcement after the laptop was stolen, with the goal of recovering the computer and protecting the sensitive data," Beutel said in the agency's first public update since disclosing the theft to employees. "At the same time, NASA IT specialists and security officials began performing an exhaustive automated and manual analysis of the data to make sure everyone with information on the stolen laptop is notified."

The agency is currently in the process of notifying the victims of the breach, Beutel added.

The theft prompted questions about why personal data is stored on a laptop and why it wasn't encrypted.

The incident prompted an immediate agency-wide initiative to implement full disk encryption on all NASA laptops by Dec. 21, starting with those carried by teleworking employees.

Beutel said the laptop was stolen from a teleworking employee whose job responsibilities included reviewing personally identifiable information.

NASA does have rules stating that all individual files with PII should be encrypted, Beutel said.

However, he added, "The stolen computer was password protected, but some of the specific files were not encrypted as required by NASA policy. The hard drive also had not yet received the whole disk encryption software as part of the ongoing agency-wide effort."

Until all agency laptops are fully encrypted, NASA telecommuters must use encrypted loaner systems, Beutel said.

"Employees are being directed to review the information contained on their computers to ensure all sensitive information is appropriately encrypted at the file level, and to purge all unneeded sensitive files," he said.

Source: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9233701/NASA_breach_update_Stolen_laptop_had_data_on_10_000_users?taxonomyId=82

Free fruit at school tied to fewer junk snacks

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Norwegian children attending schools where free fruit was on offer ate less junk food and drank less soda than before the fruit was available, according to a new study that also found kids from disadvantaged households seemed to benefit the most.

Although fruit promotion programs are thought to succeed in getting kids to eat more fruit, it's been unclear whether children were just adding those snacks on top of what they were already eating.

"Previous work has shown fruit consumption goes up when they offer the program, but this study adds that consumption of junk food goes down," said Punam Ohri-Vachaspati, a professor at Arizona State University School of Nutrition and Health Promotion, who was not involved in the study.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture encourages children and adults to eat more fresh fruit as part of a healthy diet, and some schools participate in the agency's Fruit and Vegetable Program, which provides free fruit and vegetables to students.

In Norway, schools can also sign up for a free fruit program, in which children who enroll are given a piece of fruit daily, or for a subscription program, in which parents pay a fee to have fruit given to their kids at school.

Nina Cecilie Øverby, the study's lead author and a professor at the University of Agder in Kristiansand, said that she and her colleagues have found both types of school program are associated with an increase in how much fruit kids eat.

But to find out whether the fruit is replacing other foods, they surveyed about 1,300 6th and 7th graders at 27 schools in two Norwegian counties - first in 2001 and again in 2008.

In 2001, before any of the schools initiated a fruit promotion, the kids reported that they ate an average of 6.6 unhealthy snacks per week.

These included soda, candy and potato chips.

By 2008, five schools had a free fruit program, 10 schools participated in a fruit subscription plan and 12 schools had no official fruit program.

At that point, children at all of the schools reported they were eating less junk food - an average of 4.4 times per week.

Øverby noted that this overall reduction reflects nation-wide initiatives to reduce sugar-sweetened foods and drinks.

"In addition, there was much publicity about the potential negative health effects of added sugar in this time period," she told Reuters Health in an email.

Still, kids at schools with a fruit program showed even larger declines in the amount of junk food they ate than those at the schools with no official program.

Children who attended the free-fruit schools, for instance, ate 2.8 fewer junk food snacks each week in 2008 than their counterparts in 2001.

In comparison, kids at schools without a program ate 1.5 fewer junk food snacks in 2008 than in 2001, the researchers report in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

When researchers looked at the children's family backgrounds, they found that those whose parents had no higher education generally consumed more junk food than more advantaged peers, but also showed the biggest drop in consumption.

In 2001, kids from disadvantaged households had unhealthy snacks an average of 7.3 times a week; in 2008 that figure had dropped to 4 times a week in schools with free fruit and 4.9 times where a fruit subscription program was available.

"A reason why schools with fruit programs see the largest decrease of unhealthy snacks compared to non-fruit program schools could be that when fruit and vegetables are available for the pupils, their need for energy is satisfied, and there is not the same need to consume unhealthy snacks," said Øverby's co-author, Elling Bere, also a professor at the University of Agder.

Bere added that fruit - with its high levels of water and fiber - is satiating, and can help to reduce kids' hunger for unhealthy snacks.

The study did not show whether kids at schools with a fruit program ate fewer calories overall or if the reduction in junk food made any difference to their health.

Bere said his team is conducting more research into whether these changes have any impact on children's risk for obesity.

Helping kids learn to make healthy diet choices at an early age is likely to have lasting impacts on their decisions into adulthood, Ohri-Vachaspati said.

SOURCE: http://tinyurl.com/95n9dz8 The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, online October 3, 2012.

Collective vs. Individualistic Societies ( Article from NY times)

This article corresponds to the topic of collectiveness on pages 122-123 (Unit 10) CAE-CPE

DAVID BROOKS    THE NEW YORK TIMES Collective vs. individualistic societies
August 14, 2008
CHENGDU, China
The world can be divided in many ways – rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian – but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.
This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.
These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.
When the psychologist Richard Nisbett showed Americans individual pictures of a chicken, a cow and hay and asked the subjects to pick out the two that go together, the Americans would usually pick out the chicken and the cow. They're both animals. Most Asian people, on the other hand, would pick out the cow and the hay, since cows depend on hay. Americans are more likely to see categories. Asians are more likely to see relationships.
You can create a global continuum with the most individualistic societies – such as the United States or Britain – on one end, and the most collectivist societies – such as China or Japan – on the other.
The individualistic countries tend to put rights and privacy first. People in these societies tend to overvalue their own skills and overestimate their own importance to any group effort. People in collective societies tend to value harmony and duty. They tend to underestimate their own skills and are more self-effacing when describing their contributions to group efforts.
Researchers argue about why certain cultures have become more individualistic than others. Some say Western cultures draw their values from ancient Greece, with its emphasis on individual heroism, while other cultures draw on more on tribal philosophies. Recently, some scientists theorized that it all goes back to microbes. Collectivist societies tend to pop up in parts of the world, especially around the equator, with plenty of disease-causing microbes. In such an environment, you'd want to shun outsiders, who might bring strange diseases, and enforce a certain conformity over eating rituals and social behavior.
Either way, individualistic societies have tended to do better economically. We in the West have a narrative that involves the development of individual reason and conscience during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and then the subsequent flourishing of capitalism. According to this narrative, societies get more individualistic as they develop.
But what happens if collectivist societies snap out of their economic stagnation? What happens if collectivist societies, especially those in Asia, rise economically and come to rival the West? A new sort of global conversation develops.
The opening ceremony in Beijing was a statement in that conversation. It was part of China's assertion that development doesn't come only through Western, liberal means, but also through Eastern and collective ones.
The ceremony drew from China's long history, but surely the most striking features were the images of thousands of Chinese moving as one – drumming as one, dancing as one, sprinting on precise formations without ever stumbling or colliding. We've seen displays of mass conformity before, but this was collectivism of the present – a high-tech vision of the harmonious society performed in the context of China's miraculous growth.
If Asia's success reopens the debate between individualism and collectivism (which seemed closed after the Cold War), then it's unlikely that the forces of individualism will sweep the field or even gain an edge.
For one thing, there are relatively few individualistic societies on Earth. For another, the essence of a lot of the latest scientific research is that the Western idea of individual choice is an illusion and the Chinese are right to put first emphasis on social contexts.
Scientists have delighted to show that so-called rational choice is shaped by a whole range of subconscious influences, like emotional contagions and priming effects (people who think of a professor before taking a test do better than people who think of a criminal). Meanwhile, human brains turn out to be extremely permeable (they naturally mimic the neural firings of people around them). Relationships are the key to happiness. People who live in the densest social networks tend to flourish, while people who live with few social bonds are much more prone to depression and suicide.
The rise of China isn't only an economic event. It's a cultural one. The ideal of a harmonious collective may turn out to be as attractive as the ideal of the American dream.
It's certainly a useful ideology for aspiring autocrats.

what is stress?

What is stress?

Stress is simply a fact of nature -- forces from the inside or outside world affecting the individual. The individual responds to stress in ways that affect the individual as well as their environment. Because of the overabundance of stress in our modern lives, we usually think of stress as a negative experience, but from a biological point of view, stress can be a neutral, negative, or positive experience.

In general, stress is related to both external and internal factors. External factors include the physical environment, including your job, your relationships with others, your home, and all the situations, challenges, difficulties, and expectations you're confronted with on a daily basis. Internal factors determine your body's ability to respond to, and deal with, the external stress-inducing factors. Internal factors which influence your ability to handle stress include your nutritional status, overall health and fitness levels, emotional well-being, and the amount of sleep and rest you get.

Stress has driven evolutionary change (the development and natural selection of species over time). Thus, the species that adapted best to the causes of stress (stressors) have survived and evolved into the plant and animal kingdoms we now observe.

  

Source: http://www.medicinenet.com/stress/article.htm#What_is_stress   

By ERICA GOODE
Published: December 17, 2002

In this season of bickering relatives and whining children, of overcrowded department stores and unwritten Christmas cards, it is instructive to consider the plight of the Pacific salmon.
As the fish leap, flop and struggle upstream to spawn, their levels of cortisol, a potent stress hormone, surge, providing energy to fight the current. But the hormone also leads the salmon to stop eating. Their digestive tracts wither away. Their immune systems break down. And after laying their eggs, they die of exhaustion and infection, their bodies worn out by the journey.
Salmon cannot help being stressed out. They are programmed to die, their systems propelled into overdrive by evolutionary design.

Humans, on the other hand, are usually subject to stresses of their own making, the chronic, primarily psychological, pressures of modern life. Yet they also suffer consequences when the body's biological mechanisms for handling stress go awry.

Prolonged or severe stress has been shown to weaken the immune system, strain the heart, damage memory cells in the brain and deposit fat at the waist rather than the hips and buttocks (a risk factor for heart disease, cancer and other illnesses), said Dr. Bruce S. McEwen, director of the neuroendocrinology laboratory at the Rockefeller University and the author of a new book, ''The End of Stress as We Know It.'' Stress has been implicated in aging, depression, heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes, among other illnesses.

Researchers have known for many decades that physical stress takes a toll on the body. But only relatively recently have the profound effects of psychological stress on health been widely acknowledged. Two decades ago, many basic scientists scoffed at the notion that mental state could affect illness. The link between mind and body was considered murky territory, best left to psychiatrists.

But in the last decade, researchers have convincingly demonstrated that psychological stress can increase vulnerability to disease and have begun to understand how that might occur.

''If you would have said to me back in 1982 that stress could modulate how the immune system worked, I would have said, 'Forget about it,' '' said Dr. Ronald Glaser, an immunologist at Ohio State University.

The more researchers have learned, the clearer it has become that stress may be a thread tying together many illnesses that were previously thought to be unrelated.

''What used to be thought of as pathways that led pretty explicitly to one particular disease outcome can now be seen as leading to a whole lot of different outcomes,'' said Dr. Robert M. Sapolsky, a professor of neurology at Stanford.

Central to this new understanding is a novel conception of stress, developed by Dr. McEwen, who has been studying the subject for more than three decades. According to his model, it is not stress per se that is harmful. Rather, the problems associated with stress result from a complicated interaction between the demands of the outside world and the body's capacity to manage potential threats.

That capacity can be influenced by heredity and childhood experience; by diet, exercise and sleep patterns; by the presence or absence of close personal relationships; by income level and social status; and by the piling on of normal stresses to the point that they overload the system.

In moderate amounts, the scientists argue, stress can be benign, even beneficial, and most people are equipped to deal with it.

Preparing to give a speech, take a test or avoid a speeding car, the body undergoes an elaborate series of adjustments. Physiological processes essential in mobilizing a response -- the cardiovascular system, the immune system, the endocrine glands and brain regions involved in emotion and memory -- are recruited into action. Nonessential functions like reproduction and digestion are put off till later.

Adrenaline, and later cortisol, both stress hormones secreted by the adrenal glands, flood the body. Heart rate and blood pressure rise, respiration quickens, oxygen flows to the muscles, and immune cells prepare to rush to the site of an injury.

When the speech is delivered, the test taken or the car avoided, another complex set of adjustments calms things down, returning the body to normal.

This process of ''equilibrium through change'' is called allostasis, and it is essential for survival. But it was developed, Dr. McEwen and Dr. Sapolsky point out, for the dangers humans might have encountered in a typical day on the savannah, the sudden appearance of a lion, for example, or a temporary shortage of antelope meat.

Blaring car alarms, controlling bosses, two-career marriages, six-mile traffic jams and rude salesclerks were simply not part of the plan.

When stress persists for too long or becomes too severe, Dr. McEwen said, the normally protective mechanisms become overburdened, a condition that he refers to as allostatic load. The finely tuned feedback system is disrupted, and over time it runs amok, causing damage.

Work that Dr. McEwen and his colleagues have conducted with rats nicely illustrates this wear-and-tear effect. In the studies, the rats were placed in a small compartment, their movement restricted for six hours a day during their normal resting time. The first time the rats were restrained, Dr. McEwen said, their cortisol levels rose as their stress response moved into full gear. But after that, their cortisol production switched off earlier each day as they became accustomed to the restraint.

That might have been the end of the story. But the researchers also found that at 21 days, the rats began to show the effects of chronic stress. They grew anxious and aggressive. Their immune systems became slower to fight off invaders. Nerve cells in the hippocampus, a brain region involved in memory, atrophied. The production of new hippocampal neurons stopped.

Dr. Sheldon Cohen, a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, has found that people respond much the same way. Among volunteers inoculated with a cold virus, those who reported life stresses that continued for more than one month like unemployment or family problems were more likely to develop colds than those who reported stress lasting less than a month. The longer the stress persisted, the greater the risk of illness.

Allostatic load is often made worse, Dr. McEwen said, by how people respond to stress, eating fatty foods, staying late at work, avoiding the treadmill or drinking to excess. ''The fact is that we're now living in a world where our systems are not allowed a chance to rest, to go back to base line,'' he said. ''They're being driven by excess calories, by inadequate sleep, by lack of exercise, by smoking, by isolation or frenzied competition.''

The Chemistry

Shrinking Cells, Turned-Off Responses

Doctors sometimes dismiss stress-related complaints as ''all in the patient's head.'' In a sense, they are right. The brain, specifically the amygdala, detects the first signs of danger, as demonstrated in now-classic studies by Dr. Joseph LeDoux of New York University. Other brain areas evaluate the threat's importance, decide how to respond and remember when and where the danger occurred, increasing the chances of avoiding it next time.

So it is not surprising that when the stress system is derailed, the brain is a target for damage. A decade of research has demonstrated that sustained stress and the resulting overproduction of cortisol can have chilling effects on the hippocampus, a horseshoe-shaped brain structure intimately involved in memory formation.

Scientists say they believe that the hippocampus plays an active role in registering not only events, but also their context, an important task in the face of danger. In stressful situations, the hippocampus also helps turn off the stress response after the threat has subsided.

But high levels of cortisol, studies have shown, can shrink nerve cells in the hippocampus and halt the creation of new hippocampal neurons. These changes are associated with aging and memory problems. Some evidence also links a smaller hippocampus with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and sexual abuse in childhood, though the meaning of this size difference is still being debated.

Like other hormones, cortisol normally rises and falls with daily rhythms, its production higher in the morning and lower in the evening. Prolonged or severe stress appears to disrupt the cycle. Chronically stressed people sometimes have higher base line cortisol levels and produce too much or too little of it at the wrong times.

One result, recent studies indicate, is that fat is deposited at the abdomen rather than the hips or the buttocks. One of cortisol's primary functions is to help mobilize energy in times of acute stress by releasing glucose into the blood. But when cortisol remains chronically elevated, it acts, along with high insulin levels, to send fat into storage at the waist. This makes sense if a famine looms. But it is bad news for anyone who wants to minimize the risk of heart disease, cancer and other illnesses.

Studies have shown that excess cortisol secretion in animals increases visceral fat. And Dr. Elissa S. Epel at the University of California at San Francisco has found that even in slender women, stress, cortisol and belly fat seem to go together.

The notion that being stressed makes people sick is a popular one, and most people subscribe to some version of it. Come down with the flu in the midst of a messy divorce or a frantic period at the office, and someone is bound to blame stress.

But it was not until the 1980's and early 90's that scientists began to discover the mechanisms that might lie behind the mind and body link. Investigators uncovered nerves that connect the brain with the spleen and thymus, organs important in immune responses, and they established that nerve cells could affect the activity of infection-fighting white blood cells.

Scientists also found that cytokines, proteins produced by immune cells, could influence brain processes. Among other things, the proteins appeared able to activate the second major phase of the stress response, the so-called hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal, or H.P.A., axis. In this chemical sequence, the hypothalamus, situated in the forebrain, dispatches chemical signals to the pituitary, which in turn secretes the stress hormone ACTH, prompting the adrenal glands to produce cortisol.

Much remains unknown about how the brain, the endocrine system and the immune system interact, and some of what is known is not well understood. For example, high levels of cortisol have long been known to shut off the production and action of cytokines, which initiate the immune response. At normal levels, cortisol can enhance immunity by increasing the production of inflammation-fighting cytokines. Yet in some cases, it seems, cortisol does not properly shut down the immune system under stress, allowing the continued production of cytokines that promote inflammation. These cytokines have been linked to heart disease, depression, stroke and other illnesses.

Still, scientists can watch stress hammer away at the immune system in the laboratory. Dr. Glaser of Ohio State and his wife, Dr. Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, found that small wounds took an average of nine days longer to heal in women who cared for patients with Alzheimer's disease than in women who were not under similar stress. In another study, arguments between husbands and wives were accompanied by increases in stress hormones and immunological changes over a 24-hour period.

Stress also seems to make people more likely to contract some infectious illnesses. Dr. Cohen of Carnegie Mellon has spent years inoculating intrepid volunteers with cold and influenza viruses, and his findings offer strong evidence that stressed people are more likely to become infected and had more severe symptoms after becoming ill.

A direct link between stress and more serious diseases, however, has been more difficult to establish, Dr. Cohen said. Recent studies have provided increased support for the notion that stress contributes to heart disease, and researchers have tied psychological stress, directly or indirectly, to diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, severe depression and other mental disorders. But the influence of chronic stress on other diseases like cancer remains controversial. All the same, Dr. Cohen said, ''The evidence that stress puts people at risk for disease is a lot better than it was 10 years ago.''

The Risks

From an Early Start, Lifelong Effects

Why do some people seem more vulnerable to life's pressures than others? Personality and health habits play a role. And severe stress in early life appears to cast a long shadow.

Dr. Michael Meaney of McGill University and his colleagues have found that rat pups intensively licked and groomed by their mothers were bolder and secreted lower levels of the stress hormone ACTH in stressful situations than rats lacking such attention -- an equanimity that lasted throughout their lives. (Cuddled pups, the researchers found in another study, were also smarter than their neglected peers.)

In humans, physical and sexual abuse and other traumas in childhood have been associated with a more pronounced response to stress later in life. In one study, Dr. Charles Nemeroff, a psychiatrist at Emory University, and his colleagues found that women who were physically or sexually abused as children secreted more of two stress hormones in response to a mildly stressful situation than women who had not been abused.

Yet perhaps the best indicator of how people are likely to be affected by stress is their position in the social hierarchy. In subordinate male monkeys, for example, the stress of being servile to their alpha counterparts causes damage in the hippocampus. And dominant monkeys who are repeatedly moved from social group to social group, forcing them to constantly re-establish their position, also exhibit severe stress and are more likely to develop atherosclerosis, according to studies by Dr. Jay Kaplan of Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

Being low in the hierarchy also affects reproduction, presumably because evolution dictated that in times of stress, other factors were more pressing than procreation. In a recent study, Dr. Kaplan found that the constant low-level harassment by dominant female monkeys shut down reproductive function in subordinate females and built up fat deposits in their arteries.

It would be nice to think that humans are less chained to their social rankings. But alas, researchers have found this not to be the case. A wealth of studies shows that the risk for many diseases increases with every step down the socioeconomic scale, even when factors like smoking and access to health care are taken into account.

A real estate mogul living in a Park Avenue penthouse has a better health prognosis than the head of a small company in an upscale condo a few blocks away. And a renter in a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan will be a tier or two lower still in health expectations.

Even people's perceptions of their relative standings in society affect their disease risk. In one study, led by Dr. Nancy E. Adler, also at the University of California at San Francisco, women who placed themselves higher on the social ladder reported better physical health and had lower resting cortisol levels and less abdominal fat than women who placed themselves on lower rungs.

No matter what one's circumstances, of course, some stress in life is inevitable. But illness is not, Dr. McEwen said. A variety of strategies can help reduce disease risk.

Reaching for a gallon of ice cream to soothe the tension of a family argument is not one of them, however, nor is forgoing exercise in favor of curling up on the sofa for an eight-hour marathon of ''Law and Order.''

The best ways to cope, Dr. McEwen said, turn out to be the time-honored ones: eat sensibly, get plenty of sleep, exercise regularly, stop at one martini and stay away from cigarettes. ''It's a matter of making choices in your life,'' he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/science/the-heavy-cost-of-chronic-stress.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

Daniela dI Fiore

Would you like to read some more ?

CENTRO DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES C-65

If you want to read more articles on the topics  of your exams at the CEI C-65 , you just have to click at www.centroingles.com.ar  and register there. Tell us what topic you need extra material on and we will send it to your mail.
Don t forget to read the blog articles, there are quite a number of them which are pretty interesting to read . Remember you must pick one for discussion in your oral exam with the native speaker on December 16th , 2014
Reading is food for thought and it will surely inspire you for your  oral discussions and written tasks

Prof Alejandro Prof Yamila Prof Alfred Prof Patricia

EXAM TIME SUPPORT FOR ELEMENTARY LEVEL

CENTRO DE ESTUDIOS  INGLESES  C-65 

SUPPORT MATERIAL

 ELEMENTARY LEVEL 

Ex 1 :  Answer the following questions, and give an brief explanation:

1)      What is your favourite newspaper or magazine?

2)      Which  pub or restaurant do you go to most?

3)      Which sport do Argentines generally practise ?

4)      Who is your mum or dad´s favourite actor or actress?

5)      What interesting places to visit are there in Buenos Aires?

Ex 2:  Complete with suitable words according to the meaning of the text

I love Buenos Aires , it :……………… many attractions. The obelisk ………….

in the centre of  the town  and ……………… is very tall. There ……………many shoppings centres in the city : Disco, Carrefour, Jumbo. There ………………. can buy many interesting things and some are ………………….( not expensive) 

These shopping centres ……………………….. lots of  stores ( international stores ) eg. Christian Dior, Givenchy, etc.  ………….. are many restaurants too and they are …………………….. on Sundays and Saturdays, ( with a lot of  people) 

Argentines ………………….very friendly people.

Ex 3: Complete with possessive adjectives

This is my Friend Charlie,. ……………………. nationality is Italian,.

……………….. sister´s name is Sheila,. …………………. nationality is Italian too.

………………………parents do not live in Italy, now they live in Argentina,

Argentina is your country and it is my country too, so it is ………………. Country

Ex 4:  Complete with suitable words according to the meaning of the conversation

B Professional Office Supplies. ........ I help you?

A Yes, ............... order some supplies.

B OK. What´s your last ..........?

A My last name is Robertson

B And your …………number?

A 34659-9658

B And what ..........   ........... like to order?

A I need a box of staples, item #56, how much .......   .............?

B They are $ 79 a box.

A OK. I also need a ………. Cabinet, item # 76.     ……  ……..  have the price please?

B Yes, it’s $ 178.56.

EXAM TIME EXERCISES FOR ELEMENTARY

           CENTRO  DE ESTUDIOS INGLESES C-65

     Azcuénaga 764 1st fl (1029)  4962-5409/  4964-2419  cei@redynet2.com.ar

Exercises 1^st Level

·         Communication: Complete the conversations

.

Gary: _Hullo Allan How are you  today? 

Tina: ____________________________________And you ?

Gary: _I m _______ too, thanks  Are you a  ________________in this class?

Tina Yes, I m new . You and me are  now classmates 

Gary Welcome then 

         Make sentences using the following words . Careful: You have four groups of words, but you must make at least  6  sentences
 

a)   fifteen / old. / years / I’m

b)   students. / Mike / Sue / are / and / foreign

c)   my/ sleeping/ is not/ boss/ now / is / working

d)   spell / you / “orange” ? / do / How

·         Complete the conversation

Susie is fourteen years old and she is in Year 10. Her favourite subject is Computer studies and her favourite sports are athletics and gymnastics.

Ann: What’s your name?

Susie: _________________ (1)

Ann: How old are you?

Susie: _________________(2)

Ann: What year are you in?

Susie:_________________(3)

Ann: What’s your favourite subject?

Susie:_________________(4)

·         Some words are not  on the  following postcard because it is very old. Ask the questions about the missing information

Hullo, Susan and Mary

We arrived on Monday.  The weather is ………………….  Our hotel is on ……….

Street, in front of the sea.  The rooms are  ………………….    We go to the beach  everyday in the ……………………

We are going  on an excursion tomorrow. We will write to you soon,

Love, Andrew

COMPOSITION WRITING TOPIC AND SUPP STS

F.C., C.A.E  STUDENTS  must often complete  texts with sentences or paragraphs that have been left out. This requires to know  the principles of TOPIC AND SUPPORTING SENTENCES
If you want further explanations  please read

http://www.studyzone.org/testprep/ela4/j/supportsentp.cfm

You may find this very useful 

Your teachers Alex, Yamila and Pat 

FIRST CERTIFICATE LISTENING COMP PAPERS

EXAMPLES OF LISTENING TESTS ON THE WEB
If you want some extra practice, here you are

http://www.examenglish.com/FCE/fce_listening_part1.htm?gclid=CNWw3P3i0bMCFRQcnAod7FcAeQ

PARTS OF THE LISTENING COMP PAPER F.C.

FCE Paper 4 Listening 

Time allowed: Approximately 40 minutes

Part	Task type	Tests ability to	Questions
1. Multiple Choice	A series of extracts with one or more speakers lasting around 30 seconds each. Candidates answer one multiple choice question per extract, each with three options: A, B or C.	pick out general meaning specific information, understand attitude and/or events from the text.	8
2. Sentence completion	A three-minute monologue or dialogue. Candidates fill in the gaps to complete the sentences.	pick out general meaning or specific information from the text.	10
3. Multiple matching	A series of related monologues lasting around 30 seconds each. Candidates match the extract to the correct option from a list of six.	pick out general meaning specific information, understand attitude and/or events from the text.	5
4. Multiple choice	A three-minute monologue or dialogue. Candidates answer multiple choice questions with 3 options: A, B or C.	pick out general meaning or specific information from the text.	7

Table: FCE Paper 4 Listening