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Exercise

Instructions:

You are given a piece of text which is divided into sections, and a set of questions.

You are also given a set of choices for each question.

Choose the correct answer by clicking on the button.

The sections of text may be used more than once.

 

Once all the questions have been answered, click on the check button.

Correct answers will appear in green, incorrect answers in red.

Your mark will be given as a percentage.

 

The pass mark for this exercise is 60% or over and you need to be able to do this exercise in the exam in about 10 minutes.
(You are given a timer here to help you.)

10:00 min.

The Graduate

(A) THE NY TIMES

The Graduate, Q.6 the pungent story of the sudden confusions and dismays of a bland young man fresh out of college who is plunged headlong into the intellectual vacuum of his affluent parents' circle of friends, it fashions a scarifying picture of the raw vulgarity of the swimming-pool rich, and it does so with a lively and exciting expressiveness through vivid cinema. Further, it offers an image of silver-spooned, bewildered youth, standing expectantly out with misgiving where the brook and the swimming-pool meet, that is developed so wistfully and winningly by Dustin Hoffman, an amazing new young star, that it makes you feel a little tearful and choked-up while it is making you laugh yourself raw.That's all. And yet in pursuing this simple story line, which has been adorned with delicious incidents and crackling dialogue in the screenplay by Calder Willingham and Buck Henry, based on a novel by Charles Webb, the still exploring Mr. Nichols has done such sly and surprising things with his actors and with his camera, or, rather, Robert Surtees's camera, that the overall picture has the quality of a very extensive and revealing social scan. Funny, outrageous, and touching, The Graduate is a sophisticated film that puts Mr. Nichols and his associates on a level with any of the best satirists working abroad today.

(B) The Guardian

If ever a movie captured the audience's imagination with Q.2 its musical soundtrack, it was The Graduate, that irresistibly watchable 1967 classic. Simon and Garfunkel's eerie and sublime The Sound of Silence perfectly captures both Ben's alienation and bewilderment about what he should do with his life, and then his postcoital disenchantment and self-loathing. The Graduate itself does not seem the same Q.8 in 2017 as it did in 1967. Then the emphasis was on sophisticated black comedy with a hint of 60s radicalism and student discontent, mediated through the older generation of suburbanites. Watched in the present day, the element of predatory abuse is inescapable. Q.9 You cannot see it without wondering how it might look and feel if the sexual roles were reversed. But a modern audience might also, paradoxically, be much less content with the villainous role the film finally assigns to Mrs Robinson, be more sympathetic to her midlife crisis, and remember the pathos of her abandoned interest in art. Calder Willingham and Buck Henry's screenplay, adapted from Charles Webb's 1963 novel, cleverly allows you to wonder if Mr Robinson was, in some conscious or subconscious way, complaisant in his wife's adventure. Q.5 The excellence of Katherine Ross as Mrs Robinson's daughter, Elaine, is often overlooked. A hugely pleasurable film.

(C) The Telegraph

The Graduate, starring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft and directed by Mike Nichols, is actually Q.1 a very nasty film, and a very, very funny one. As Q.7 the benchmark for every inter-generational relationship film since, it tends to live in the male public imagination largely as a reference point for cheeky forbidden fantasies regarding older women the world over. It takes about three minutes, roughly the length of time it takes Hoffman to get down the moving walkway to Q.2 Simon and Garfunkel's Sound of Silence and from the airport to the suffocating atmosphere of his graduation party, where he gets gradually trapped into a relationship with one of his parents' friends, to realise that The Graduate is actually a very nasty film, and a very, very funny one. Directorially, it is as cutting-edge late-Sixties as you can get, all fish-bowl juxtapositions, dappled light and pensive close-ups. But the world we're in here is essentially a Fifties hangover, a staid, suburban one still ruled over by The Old Folk, a place where the reason you get together with a seductively smoking alcoholic in her forties is not so much because you find her attractive but because she's the only person in the vicinity as bored as you. The result is Q.1 an exercise in claustrophobia that makes Panic Room look like a western by comparison. By the end, it doesn't matter that the lesson he's learned is the one that the old folks were telling him in the first place, that he should find a nice girl his own age. Q.1 The feeling of freedom is immense.

(D) Variety

The Graduate is a delightful, satirical comedy-drama about a young man's seduction by an older woman, and the measure of maturity which he attains from the experience. An excellent screenplay by Calder Willingham and comedy specialist Buck Henry, based on the Charles Webb novel, focuses on Hoffman, just out of college and wondering what it's all about. Predatory Miss Bancroft, wife of Murray Hamilton, introduces Hoffman to mechanical sex, reaction to which evolves into true love with Miss Ross, Miss Bancroft's daughter. In Q.10 the 70 minutes which elapse from Hoffman's arrival home from school to the realization by Miss Ross that he has had an affair with her mother, the pic is loaded with hilarious comedy and, because of this, the intended commentary on materialistic society is most effective. Only in retrospect does one realize a basic, but not overly damaging, flaw that Q.4 Hoffman's achievements in school are not credible in light of his basic shyness. No matter, or not much, anyway. Only in Q.10 the final 35 minutes, as Hoffman drives up and down the LA-Frisco route in pursuit of Miss Ross, does Q.3 the film falter in pacing, result of which the switched-on cinematics become obvious, and therefore tiring, although the experience is made tolerable by Q.2 the excellent music of Simon and Garfunkle.

The Questions

Which review

1) uses more than one contradiction to make its point?

  • A
  • B
  • C
  • D

Why?

2) neglects to identify the powerful role played by music in this film?

  • A
  • B
  • C
  • D

Why?

3) is critical of the rhythm of the film?

  • A
  • B
  • C
  • D

Why?

4) suggests the film contains elements which are hard to believe?

  • A
  • B
  • C
  • D

Why?

5) feels an actor's contribution was not appreciated as much as it should have been?

  • A
  • B
  • C
  • D

Why?

6) makes the point that the story on which the film was based is distasteful?

  • A
  • B
  • C
  • D

Why?

7) offers the suggestion that this film has become a cinematical reference?

  • A
  • B
  • C
  • D

Why?

8) looks at the film from different points in time?

  • A
  • B
  • C
  • D

Why?

9) offers a fleeting glimpse into the unfair way male and female behaviour is judged in society?

  • A
  • B
  • C
  • D

Why?

10) seems unnecessarily preoccupied by the timing of various elements of the film?

  • A
  • B
  • C
  • D

Why?