Read the passage and answer the questions A and B.

Valentina Tereshkova was born in the village Maslennikovo, Tutayevsky District, in Central Russia. Tereshkova's  father was a tractor driver and her mother worked in a textile plant. Tereshkova began school in 1945 at the age of  eight but left school in 1953 and continued 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 that time she was employed as a textile worker at 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 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 15 UTI 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 15 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 count down, Vostok-6 launched faultlessly