the toeic cage

Mio recently took a toeic examination so she can become a pilot or something. Malale observed that the filled-in practice sheet resembled an avant-garde score, from when things where avant-garde circa 1963.

Malale has been reading the Bride and the Bachelors. In this book John Cage appears on an Italian game show to answer questions on mushrooms, once a week for five weeks, each week with the questions getting harder, and a wrong answer meaning all the gained monies were taken away to feed the starving children of birkenhead. John Cage made it all the way to the fifth week, and then:

"he was placed in a glass isolation booth. The final question was to name all the genera of white-spored mushrooms. Cage had expected something of this sort and had memorised the genera of white-spored, black-spored, and every other spore-coloured species. He started in very slowly, naming them in alphabetical order, being very careful not to leave any out. He had no idea that there was a time limit on his answer. Gradually, in his isolation booth, he became aware that people in the studio audience were getting excited, jumping up and down in their seats and gesturing wildly toward a clock on the wall above his head, but Cage could not see the clock and he continued to take his time. As each of his careful answers filtered out through the booth and was translated, the hysteria in the studio increased. Finally, half a second before his time was up, he named the last white-spored mushroom, and the audience exploded in delirium."

After a brief interslot search mio tells me toeic stands for "Test Of English for International Communication"