FND 3016READING PRACTICE TEST201420
Text 1: Questions 1 to 30
Encyclopedia
1. An encyclopedia is a collection of information about all the things human beings know. Whether it is published on paper or online, an encyclopedia is a huge collection of articles, each on a different subject. The first encyclopedias may have begun as lecture notes by and for teachers of ancient schools over a thousand years ago. There was so much information in them that it was separated into different books, called volumes. Each was for a different subject or course of study. The word encyclopedia at first meant the teachings of the school. The name "encyclopedia" is from the 16th century.
2. After the printing press was invented, dictionaries with long definitions began to be called encyclopedias. For example, if a dictionary of science included essays, itwas thought of as an encyclopedia or a knowledgeable book on the subject of science. Some encyclopedias then included essays on more than one subject and put them in alphabetical order instead of grouping them together by subject. This is very similar to how most encyclopedias look today.
3. In the eighteenth century,companiesstarted publishing encyclopedias for public use in libraries, which is different from when an encyclopedia was used as the curriculum in a private school. These publishers employed hundreds of experts to write articles on thousands of different subjects. They also had toread, edit and choose the articles. People thought these books were extremely important and used them to check facts and for research. Today, Internet encyclopedias allow their visitors to submit articles. An example of this is Wikipedia. Encyclopedias are a great source of knowledge and include topics on just about any topic or subject you can think of.
4. The largest online encyclopedia in the English language is Wikipedia, which contains more than 4.75 million articles. The second largest is the Encyclopedia Britannica, which also happens to bethe largest in print form. Not everyone thinks online encyclopedias are as good as printed ones. One critic says that Wikipedia is not as good as other encyclopedias because anyone can change it, so some people may write things that are wrong. Also, the way that Wikipedia works means that there is likely to be bias – this is when people write things that they want others to believe in, but they might not be true.
Adapted from: