Cefr practice reading tests complete the text true or false

7. When he talks about complaints about noise, Brunetti
A) suggests that he finds the system for dealing with them ridiculous. 
B) explains that he is not sure what the system for dealing with them is. 
C) says that he wishes that the police could deal with them. 
D) says that the people who deal with them are always very busy. 
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CEFR READING PART PRACTICE – MULTIPLE CHOICE
Read the text and answer the questions 1-7. 
 
TASK 7 
 
Harry Houdini, who died in 1927, was the entertainment phenomenon of the ragtime era. He could escape from 
chains and padlocks, from ropes and canvas sacks. They put him in a strait-jacket and hung him upside down from a 
skyscraper and he somehow untied himself. They tied him up in a locked packing case and sank him in Liverpool 
docks. Minutes later he surfaced smiling. They locked him in a zinc-lined Russian prison van and he emerged 
leaving the doors locked and the locks undamaged. They padlocked him in a milk chum full of water and he burst 
free. They put him in a coffin, screwed down the lid, and buried him and... well, no, he didn’t pop up like a mole, 
but when they dug him up more than half an hour later, he was still breathing. 
Houdini would usually allow his equipment to be examined by the audience. The chains, locks and packing cases all 
seemed perfectly genuine, so it was tempting to conclude that he possessed superhuman powers. Sir Arthur Conan 
Doyle's Sherlock Holmes was the very paragon of analytical thinking but Conan Doyle believed that Houdini 
achieved his tricks through spiritualism. Indeed, he wrote to the escapologist imploring him to use his psychic 
powers more profitably for the common good instead of just prostituting his talent every night at the Alhambra. 
However, Houdini repeatedly denounced spiritualism and disclaimed any psychic element to his act. 
The alternative explanation for his feats of escapism was that Houdini could do unnatural things with his body. It is 
widely held that he could dislocate his shoulders to escape from strait- jackets, and that he could somehow contract 
his wrists in order to escape from handcuffs. His ability to spend long periods in confined spaces is cited as 
evidence that he could put his body into suspended animation, as Indian fakirs are supposed to do. 
This is all nonsense. If you ever find yourself in a strait-jacket, it's difficult to imagine anything less helpful than a 
dislocated shoulder. Contracting your wrists is not only unhelpful but, frankly, impossible because the bones of your 
wrist arc very tightly packed together and the whole structure is virtually incompressible. As for suspended 
animation, the trick of surviving burial and drowning relies on the fact that you can live for short periods on the air 
in a confined space. The air shifted by an average person in a day would occupy a cube just eight feet square. The 
build-up of carbon monoxide tends to pollute this supply, but, if you can relax, the air in a coffin should keep you 
going for half an hour or so. 
In other words, there was nothing physically remarkable about Houdini except for his bravery, dexterity and fitness. 
His nerve was so cool that he could remain in a coffin sue feet underground until they came to dig him up. His 
fingers were so strong that he could undo a buckle or manipulate keys through the canvas of a strait-jacket or a mail 
bag. He made a comprehensive study of locks and was able to conceal lock-picks about his person in a way which 
fooled even the doctors who examined him. When they locked him in the prison van he still had a hacksaw blade 
with which to saw through the joins in the metal lining and get access to the planks of the floor. As an entertainer he 
combined all this strength and ingenuity with a lot of trickery. His stage escapes took place behind a curtain with an 
orchestra playing to disguise the banging and sawing. The milk chum in which he was locked had a double lining so 
that, while the lid was locked onto the rim, the rim was not actually attached to the chum. Houdini merely had to 
stand up to get out. The mail sack he cut open at the seam and sewed up with similar thread. The bank safe from 
which he emerged had been secretly worked on by his mechanics for 24 hours before the performance. 
All Houdini's fasts arc eminently explicable, although to explain them, even now. is a kind of heresy Houdini 
belongs to that band of mythical supermen who, we like to believe, were capable of miracles and would still be alive 
today were it not for some piece of low trickery. It's said of Houdini that a punch in his belly when he wasn’t 
prepared for it caused his burst appendix. Anatomically, it's virtually impossible that a punch could puncture your 
gut. but the story endures. Somehow the myth of the superman has an even greater appeal than the edifice of 
twenty-first century logic. 

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