IESOL Reading – Sample Paper 2

Mardi Gras and New Orleans

Mardi Gras is a French 0) expression, meaning "Fat Tuesday." Mardi Gras celebrations take place every year in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the south eastern part of the United States.

During Mardi Gras, huge crowds ____ the streets of New Orleans. People flock to the city to eat, drink, dance and join in with the party! Police mingle amongst the crowds to keep a watchful eye on the proceedings, just in case things get out of hand.

The build-up to the holiday begins early, and many parties and parades have already taken ____ by the time Fat Tuesday comes around. Many local groups and community associations hold parades, with some of the massive floats carrying up to two hundred and fifty people!

People who ride on the floats wear ornate and brightly coloured costumes, and outlandishly tall headdresses, ____ bird feathers. Beautiful, and sometimes strange, masks cover the faces of people on the floats. It is traditional for people riding on the floats to throw cups and necklaces amongst the crowd of people who are watching the parades.

Another Mardi Gras tradition is to eat King Cake, a kind of sweet bread. King Cake is a special type of cake associated with the festival of Epiphany, which is served at Mardi Gras parties. Hidden inside the cake is a small plastic baby, which is said by some to ____ the baby Jesus. The person who gets the piece of cake with the baby inside has to promise to host the next party and buy the cake for the next celebration!

In New Orleans, music spills into the streets not just at Mardi Gras, but all year ____. New Orleans is known as the birthplace of jazz, but other musical genres associated with the city include Cajun and Zydeco music.

On Bourbon Street, the music and the crowds seem like a huge celebration that never ends. The most traditional old-time jazz is played at Preservation Hall in the French Quarter. As they say in New Orleans, it is the kind of jazz that ____ your blood moving!

How will advertisers reach us?

Record-setting numbers of viewers are tuned in to watch the game by using handheld devices that allow them to project the transmissions on to any flat surface. And in 2030, not unlike today, viewers are interested in the game, but they're actually more absorbed by the advertising. The commercials on screen are far better than they are now. Directors make sure they are moving, exciting, entertaining and technicians make sure the effects are breathtaking. It's not the commercials on screen that are the most interesting part, though: the really crucial advertising is hiding in plain sight on the field. Brand names blaze from each player's shirt. The game is held at U-tech Stadium in U-tech town — formerly known as Philadelphia. Corporations will pay big money for the right to digitize logos on to the T-shirts of the fans in the stands. Logos of sponsors won't be painted on stadium signs or on the field any more. Thanks to technology that is already emerging, logos of sponsors will be digitally embedded in the image on your screen. The logos you see will be chosen depending on your personal interests and profile, and they'll be different from the ones aimed at your next-door neighbours.

Advertising will change profoundly over the next couple of decades, although there's a good chance you won't notice the difference, since the most meaningful changes won't be visible to the casual observer. It's the changes that are happening underground that will count, and they're the ones we should be aware of. Advertising in the future will be stealthily and eerily targeted, disturbingly omnipresent and inescapable. Technology, naturally, will be the engine. User-tracking software that records your TV and Internet viewing habits in minute detail — and crosses it with your purchasing history — will allow the advertiser to know that you have children, that you eat meat, that your native tongue is Spanish and that your dishwasher is however many years old. That way you will be shown commercials for mini-vans, cheeseburgers and replacement dishwashers, all in Spanish, and not for sports cars, tofu and replacement refrigerators, in English. In fact, this technology already exists. Refined with data that track what kinds of online ads you tend to click on — funny, sentimental, fact-laden — every commercial will hit home.

Say what you will, that's a nifty trick. In the future, people won't be bothered with advertising messages irrelevant to them. They'll tend to like advertising better because it's so carefully tailored to their tastes and will begin to feel less like an intrusion. This works for the advertiser too because fewer dollars will be wasted. While it's a little dispiriting to think we can be so predictably manipulated, maybe that's a fair price to pay to avoid the pollution of messages you don't care about.

Nevertheless, it seems clear that the advertising outlets that exist today — TV and radio commercials, print ads, billboards and taxi tops — will be inadequate for accommodating all the commercial messages that are agitating to get out. Advertising will therefore inevitably slip beyond the boundaries of the 30-second commercial and the full-page ad and migrate to the rest of the world, including entertainment, journalism and art. You can glimpse the future now. Product placement in movies is an obvious instance of where advertising has slipped outside its traditional container into entertainment. The music channels which are an entertainment medium designed expressly to sell records are another classic example. Every time an artist mentions a brand in their lyrics, advertising slips into art. If you have a tattoo of your team's name, you're already there. If you wear a T-shirt with a logo on it, you're also there but with less pain. Eventually, every surface that can display a message will be appropriated for advertising. A backlash is inevitable. Perhaps people will pay a premium to live in advertising-free zones.

People get very nervous when they see the line blurring between advertising and other forms of content; they think advertising is some kind of infection that pollutes the purity of art, ruins objectivity and distracts from the pleasure of entertainment. Yet this is missing the point. Surely consumers are smart and perfectly aware when they're being sold something; surely people who go to company websites are happy to find worthwhile information there and are capable of distinguishing between a commercial message and an editorial one? In the main, art and journalism have long relied on direct subsidy from private sources. Don't think for a minute that commercial interests didn't enter into it.

The genuinely disturbing aspect of the ubiquity of advertising is that it has begun to take over what was formally the property of the community. Take, for example, the popular Boston Garden park, naturally named after the city. It is now known as the 'Fleet Centre', after the sponsoring bank. A little town in the Pacific Northwest just renamed itself after a dotcom company in return for a generous donation. I won't mention the name here, since I figure advertising should be paid for. That's when advertising has gone too far: when it's become something we are, rather than something we see.