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 Aero club, making her first jump at age 22 on 21 May 1959. 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.