Read the passage and answer the questions A and B.

Valentina Tereshkova was born in a village, in Central Russia on 6 March 1937. Her father was a tractor driver and her mother worked in a textile plant. At the age of eight she began her schooling but did not enjoy it much. She left the school within a few years. Afterwards she completed her education through distance learning. She became interested in parachuting from a young age, and trained in skydiving at the local Aeroclub, making her first jump at age 22 on 21 May 1959. At the time, she was employed as a textile worker in a local factory. It was her expertise in skydiving that led to her selection as a cosmonaut. After the flight of Yuri Gagarin, the first human being to travel to outer space in April 1961, the Soviet Union decided to send a woman in spacE- On 16 February 1962, "proletaria" Valentina Tereshkova was selected for this project from among more than four hundred applicants. Tereshkova had to undergo a series of training that included weightless flights, isolation tests, centrifuge tests, rocket theory, spacecraft engineering, 120 parachute jumps and pilot training in MiG-15UTI jet fighters. Since the successful launch of the spacecraft Vostok-5 on 14 June 1963, Tereshkova began preparing for her own flight. On the morning of 16 June 1963, Tereshkova and her back-up cosmonaut Solovyova were dressed in space-suits and taken to the space shuttle launch pad by a bus. After completing her communication and life support checks, she was sealed inside Vostok-6. Finishing a two- hour countdown, Vostok-6 launched faultlessly.