GORT B-A | QuestionPro

You will now listen to a passage and answer a series of comprehension questions. The passage will begin when you press the continue button. Once the passage ends press the continue button again to proceed to the comprehension questions.

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You will now read a passage and answer a series of comprehension questions. The time it takes you to read the passage is being recorded. Recording starts when you press the continue button below and ends when you press continue again after you have finished reading the passage. Please read the passage through one time only at your normal reading speed.

Mark was delighted to obtain his deputy sheriff's badge, but now he nervously pondered the difficult undertaking ahead. As his first assignment, he had been appointed to escort a prisoner to the authorities in Preston, the county seat and the site of the impending trial. The cunning prisoner had previously eluded the law and led state troopers in hot pursuit before finally surrendering. Experienced officers had cautioned Mark that this was a treacherous and possibly violent criminal who would stop at nothing. According to reliable testimony and other evidence, he was guilty of several ruthless attacks for which his victims could offer no clear motive. But when the prisoner was delivered to Mark's vehicle, the young deputy was struck by his sympathetic appearance and courteous manner. It seemed utterly incredible to Mark that physical form and conduct could so perfectly conceal the true nature of a human being.

The entomologist had contemplated the hazards of working with this lethal strain of honeybee. Imported from Africa, these bees were high-strung and aggressive, quick to incite the entire colony when antagonized. Their excitability often provoked them to mass attacks that resulted in fatalities. Yet they produced extravagant quantities of honey, sometimes double that of their more docile European cousins. By crossing African queens with the local European drones, the entomologist planned to stimulate honey output. He had taken precautions to prevent catastrophes by locating the experimental hives in a sparsely populated area and erecting grids that curtailed the bees' range. But as the entomologist detached a grid for a routine check of his wards, he absent-mindedly crushed a stray worker. Instantaneously the murmur from the hive was amplified. A few sentinels emerged, pelting against his veil in admonition. Then the torrent broke. In a furor the swarm converged on their keeper.

There are sundry definitions of jazz, all of them vague. Their vagueness seems imperative, however, if they are to accommodate the custom of jazz to appropriate everything in sight. This receptivity to sources derives from a dominant feature of jazz: improvisation. The emphasis on improvising entails an openness to the entire legacy of diverse musical elements. Although formulating the content of jazz is not feasible, there is little difficulty in pinpointing the group that spawns the music. Jazz musicians have always constituted a subculture of music, a cultish but scarcely organized body of instrumentalists who rarely manage to eke out a livelihood from their music. Until recently they have been unschooled in their chosen music, except as they have imitated recordings of other musicians. Never accepted by academics, only partially accepted by the public, jazz musicians comprise a closed community in which innovation and experimentation are more valued than tradition.

Certainly Harriet had lately been cognizant of Mr. Weston's unnecessary chivalry, but she had construed it as an aberration of judgment or taste, as one proof among others that he had not always moved in the best circles, that with all his assiduous concern for her, the accoutrements of true gentility were wanting. But until now she had never surmised it to mean anything; his manner must have been equivocal or she could not have been so beguiled. Contrary to her wont, she found these protestations importunate and his proposal a breach of propriety. Of course he wanted to marry well, but to have the temerity to hope for anything but amicable tolerance from one so manifestly his superior proved that he only wanted to aggrandize himself. So she need not trouble herself to feel clemency. He was proving himself assuming, conceited, very full of his own claims, and with little heed for the feelings of others.