Choose the best answer:
My family enjoys ………… because we can sell vegetables and flowers ………… money.

 

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct word or phrase that best fits each of the numbered blanks.
In the past, people bought goods using (1).................. They rarely borrowed money from financial institutions and only when they had saved the money did they buy what they wanted.
Recently, however, there have been great changes in the way people purchase goods. To begin with, some people pay for things by  cheque, (2)................ others prefer monthly installments rather than paying the whole amount at once. Most consumers, though, prefer to buy things using their credit cards. (3)..............., it is thought that there are benefits to having a credit card. Apart from the fact that credit cards are handy, some stores offer bonus points to people making purchases, while others give discounts on certain products.
On the other hand, credit cards must be used wisely because they can prove disastrous. In the long run, consumers find that they can’t (4)............. without their credit cards and constantly rely on them, as they are “easy money”. As a result, some people lose control of their finances spending more than they should end up not being able to (5).................. So they end up in debt and have difficulty in paying it back.

(5)..............................

My family consists of four people. There’s my father whose name is Jan, my mother whose name is Marie, my brother Peter and of course me. I have quite a large extended family as well but only the four of us live together in our apartment in a block of flats. My father is fifty-two years old, he works as an accountant in an insurance company. He is tall and slim, has got short brown and grey hair and blue eyes. My father likes gardening very much as well as listening to music and reading books about political science. His special hobbies are bird watching and travelling.

Now I’ll describe my mother and my brother. My mother is forty-seven and she works as a nurse in a hospital. She is small and slim, has got short brown hair and green eyes. She likes bird watching and travelling too, so whenever my parents are able to them go to some places interesting for nature watching. Since we have a cottage with a garden they both spend a lot of time there. My brother is sixteen. He is slim and has short brown hair and blue eyes. He also attends high school. He is interested in computers and sports like football and hockey. He also spends a lot of time with his friends.

I have only one grandmother left still living. She is in pretty good health even at the age of seventy- eight so she still lives in her own flat. I enjoy spending time with her when I can. Both my grandfathers died from cancer because they are smokers, which was really a great tragedy because I didn’t get a chance to know them. My other grandmother died just a few years ago. I also have a lot of aunts, uncles, and cousines. The cousine I’m closest to is my uncle’s daughter Pauline. We have a lot in common because we are both eighteen and so we are good friends.

My parents have assigned me certain duties around the house. I don’t mind helping out because everyone in a family should contribute in some way. I help with the washing up, the vacuuming and the shopping. Of course, I also have to help keep my room tidy as well. My brother is responsible for the dusting and the mopping. He also has to clean his own room. Even though my brother and I sometimes fight about who has to do what job, we are still very close. I am also very close to my parents and I can rely on them to help me. My parents work together to keep our home well maintained and it seems they always have some projects or another that they are working on. They respect each other’s opinions and even if they disagree they can always come to a compromise. I hope in the future that I have a family like ours.

The word “assigned” in the fourth paragraph mostly means___________

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During Tet holiday, homes are often ……….. with plants and flowers

They ____ for 3 hours when the storm suddenly broke.

(200)_______

Read the passage below carefully, and then choose the best answer:
Raising a Child Athlete
In many countries, children with sporting potential are identified early and encouraged to achieve athletic greatness by training for hours every day. While some people see this as a great opportunity for kids to be healthy, others argue that too much focus on training can hurt young people. How parents should raise child athletes has become a big topic of their debate. People who are against such serious commitment to sport say that there are many negatives to training so intensively. Here are some of their arguments: The long hours spent training can distant the child from his or her family. thletes who spend too much time training miss out on education. The child may not be prepared for other real world activities, such as going to college and having a non-athletic job. Pressure from parents and coaches to win can be psychologically damaging for the child. Parents may also become too pushy and end up caring more about athletic achievements than the child. Dr. Christine Carr, a psychologist, suggests that parents take some important steps to make sure that their kids are getting the most out of sports. Carr says that the focus should be on the child’s happiness and about learning life lessons. Self-discipline, determination, and learning to deal with failure are some of the important life skills and lessons kids can learn from sports. Other experts point to the importance of letting children make their own decisions. Top athletes Tiger Woods and Michael Phelps have said that they appreciated their parents letting them decide how much or how little they wanted to train. In fact, according to Phelps’ mother, he had trouble focusing in the classroom until he found a sport that he was passionate about. By allowing Michael to focus on his sport, his mother also saw him improve as a student. Another thing that many parents and doctors agree on is the importance of developing a close relationship with the family. Dr. Carr suggests eating dinner together and says it is a simple way to remind children that family is important, and that support can always be found at home. Woods and Phelps both had supportive families and made it public, with parents attending their many competitions. Raising an athlete is not easy. By balancing life and training, parents can set their children up for success and help them become winners in sports and in life.
4. What is said about failure in the third paragraph?

Read the passage below carefully, and then choose the best answer:
Space Debris
Once something is considered rubbish, we want to throw it away and forget about it. Yet if we are not careful about where we store it, our garbage could come back to haunt us. On the Earth, poorly discarded garbage can cause land, water, and air pollution. And now, people are starting to learn that space debris can also cause a host of different problems. Space debris is defined as a collection of objects that orbit the Earth. Space debris can be classified into two categories. One is man-made rubbish, such as old satellites, rockets, and other machinery left in space after past missions. The other is natural objects, such as meteors that are traveling through space. If you think the man-made garbage doesn’t amount to much, guess again. Researchers estimate that there are over 20,000 pieces of large debris floating around in space and approximately 300,000 smaller pieces in orbit as well. Traveling at speeds of up to 17,500 miles per hour, these objects create a great degree of danger for any spaceships when they leave or return to the Earth. We are lucky to some degree that there haven’t been too many accidents caused by space debris as of yet. Still some incidents have occurred. In 1996, a French satellite was damaged after it crashed into debris from an old French rocket. Then in 2009, an old Russian satellite collided with a working US satellite. The end result was an additional 2,000 pieces of space junk that was added to the junk pile. As the current situation can only worsen, it is now up to the international community to cooperate and create a plan to deal with space debris. For starters, several nations have pledged to take more care with the items they discard in space to cut down on future debris. Researchers are working on devising a way to label space junk, so it can be avoided. Others have proposed more creative techniques to recapture the garbage and discard it on the Earth, or destroy it with lasers. The nightmare scenario that everyone fears is if the Kessler Syndrome starts to occur. This is when the density of garbage becomes so high that it sets off a chain reaction of collisions which would raise the probability of accidents even further. Although there is not a long-term solution in place for space debris, nations are starting to understand the seriousness of this problem.
1. Space debris is _________ the Earth.

Read the passage below carefully, and then choose the best answer:
Ocean Currents and the Turning of the Tide
If you take a seat at the beach and look out across the water, you’ll soon notice that oceans have a rhythm of their own. Throughout the course of the day, sea levels will rise and fall, and water will flow through routes and end up in different places. But how does it all work? One force at play is tides, which are the alternating water levels of the ocean. There are two major gravitational forces which cause tides: the sun and the moon. The moon’s force has a tugging effect on oceans which causes them to bulge outwards on opposite sides of the planet. Solar tides operate according to the same principles. However, they are only about 50 percent as strong due to the distance between the sun and the earth. As tides rise and fall, they create tidal currents. The strongest tidal currents occur at the height of both high and low tides. Unlike other currents, they do not flow in a continuous stream. Far from shore, tidal currents don’t have much of an effect. Yet when they pass through narrow area, like harbours and bays, tidal currents can displace plants, animals, and sediment. Although they may certainly shake things up, not all of the damage is negative. Tidal currents can spread fish eggs across long distances to assist fertilization, in addition to transporting key nutrients. Another category of currents is ocean currents. These currents occur near the top of the water, and are mainly powered by the wind. One example of these is coastal currents, which are those beachgoers encounter when going for a swim. One of the strongest and most well-known currents is the Gulf Stream, which brings warm water from the Gulf of Mexico all the way to Western Europe. Meanwhile, Deep Ocean currents are a powerful force in the depths of oceans. The strongest of these has been nicknamed the global conveyor belt, and it moves much slower than surface currents. Although we can’t see it in operation, it’s about 16 times as powerful as all the earth’s rivers put together. As the global conveyor belt pushes water around the planet, it carries nutrition and carbon dioxide to places that truly need them. In the end, although there are several currents working on oceans simultaneously, they each seem to perform a necessary function that creates balance for life in the sea.
6. The word “displace” in paragraph 3 is closest in meaning to __________

Choose the best answer:
When the road __, go left.

Choose the best answer:
Three women, none of whom we _______ before, _______ out of the hall.

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct word or phrase that best fits each of the numbered blanks.
It is true that digital manufacturing does cut out the middle-man. More and more routine, repetitive assembly tasks will be taken (1).......... by machines. But as certain jobs disappear, new ones open up in other parts of the factory. Germany in many ways exemplifies this trend. Today, German manufacturers (2)........... three times more robots than U.S. companies, but they also still employ more humans. Relative to the size of our economies, German's manufacturing workforce is twice the size of America's.
From its very beginning, the fourth Industrial revolution has never presented manufacturers with an either-or choice - robots or humans. It has always been about combining the talents of (3)........... (4)..........., it is the convergence of artificial and human intelligence that will enable manufacturers to achieve a new era of speed, flexibility, efficiency and connectivity in the 21st century. Machines have the ability to assemble things faster than any human ever could, but humans possess the analytics, domain expertise and valuable knowledge (5).......... to solve problems and optimize factory floor production.

(2).....................

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions:
It is a characteristic of human nature that people like to get together and have fun, and people live during America's frontier days were no exception. However, because life was hard and the necessities of day-to-day living took up their time, it was common for recreation to be combined with activities necessary for survival. One example of such a form of recreation was logrolling. Many frontier areas were heavily wooded, and in order to settle an area it was necessary to move the trees. A settler could cut down the trees alone, but help was needed to move the cut trees. After a settler had cut a bunch of trees, he would then invite is neighbours over for a logrolling. A
logrolling is a community event where families got together for a combination of work and fun. The women would bring food and have a much needed and infrequent opportunity to relax and chat with friends, the children would play together exuberantly, and the men would hold lively competitions that involved rolling logs from place to place as quickly as possible. This was a day of fun for everyone involved, but as its foundation was the need to clear the land.

This passage would probably be assigned reading in which of the following courses?

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the undelined part that needs correction in each of the following questions:
In most discussions of cultural diversity, attention has focused on visible, explicit aspects of culture, such as language, dress, food, religion, music, and social rituals. Although they are important, these visible expressions of culture, which are taught deliberately and learned consciously, are only the tip of the iceberg of culture. Much of culture is taught and learned implicitly, or outside awareness. Thus, neither cultural insiders nor cultural outsiders are aware that certain “invisible” aspects of their culture exist.
Invisible elements of culture are important to us. For example, how long we can be late before being impolite, what topics we should avoid in a conversation, how we show interest or attention through listening behaviour, what we consider beautiful or ugly- these are all aspects of culture that we learn and use without being aware of it. When we meet other people whose invisible cultural assumptions differ from those we have learned implicitly, we usually do not recognize their behaviour as cultural in origin.
Differences in invisible culture can cause problems in cross-cultural relations. Conflicts may arise when we are unable to recognize others’ behavioural differences as cultural rather than personal. We tend to misinterpret other people’s behaviour, blame them, or judge their intentions or competence without realizing that we are experiencing cultural rather than individual differences.

Formal organizations and institutions, such as schools, hospitals, workplaces, governments, and the legal system are collection sites for invisible cultural differences. If the differences were more visible, we might have less misunderstanding. For example, if we met a man in a courthouse who was wearing exotic clothes, speaking a language other than ours, and carrying food that looked strange, we would not assume that we understood his thoughts and feelings or that he understood ours. Yet when such a man is dressed similarly to us, speaks our language, and does not differ from us in other obvious ways, we may fail to recognize the invisible cultural differences between us. As a result, mutual misunderstanding may arise.

What is the main purpose of the passage?

Read the passage carefully and choose the correct answer

I was born to dance. I've been dancing all my life, ever since my mother, who gave up a dancing career on the stage when she married my father, picked me up and twirled me around as an infant. As much as I loved dancing with her, her greatest gift to me was her “unconditional love” during her lifetime.

My parents divorced after only 5 years of marriage, but my father remarried a lovely lady who also loved to dance. They used to take me to a dancing club where I would listen to the music and watch them dance-occasionally my step-mother, Mary, invited me to dance.

I also met my wife, Charlotte, in a dancing party. I danced with her for about 15 minutes, and during that brief span, I realized that I fell in love with her. We kept dancing throughout our marriage. My earliest memories of dancing with my daughters started when I came home from work to our small home in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and my daughter Laura was about 3 years old. It was very relaxing for me to turn on the record player, pick up Laura in my arms, and dance her around the room!

Our family danced a lot. My daughters, Laura and Anne, and I continued to dance on every occasion. One favorite memory I have of dancing with Laura and Anne was when I took each of them when they were seniors in high school to the Daddy-Daughter dance. We won both dance competitions!

As their father, I have tried to provide my daughters with unconditional love, as my Mother provided to me, endless emotional and loving support, and good educations and life experiences which have helped prepare them for happy and successful adult lives. Being a father who is worthy of their love and respect, I consider fatherhood a privilege, not an entitlement.

In 1994, my oldest daughter Laura gave me a lovely book, which I still have, entitled “Fathers and Daughters.” My Father’s Day suggestion to every father is to dance with your daughters at every opportunity. It will not only bring you closer, it will give them memories of you “to hang onto” long after we are gone.

Which sentence is not true?

Read the passage below carefully, and then choose the best answer:
What Is Heritage Protection?
Heritage is traditional beliefs, customs, and culture. We use the word “heritage” in many different ways. People talk about their family’s heritage, their city’s heritage, and their country’s heritage. Here are some examples of heritage. During Chinese New Year, people in China give red envelopes. That is part of Chinese heritage. Every year in the American city New Orleans, there is a huge party called Mardi Gras. That is a part of New Orleans’ heritage. Heritage can also be more private and personal. If your family has a big dinner every Sunday night, that’s part of your family’s heritage. Today, heritage is changing. The Internet connects people around the world. In many ways, this is a good thing, because we can learn about the heritage of other countries, and we can show our own heritage to the world. However, some people worry that traditional heritage is disappearing. Think about it. In many ways, countries are becoming more and more alike. In just about every country around the world, you can find McDonald’s, Nike shoes, Starbucks coffee, and American films. Some people think this is a good change, but others don’t like it. You can decide whether or not you think it is a good thing. However, almost everyone wants to protect their traditional heritage, and sometimes this is hard. For example, when a new McDonald’s opens in your town, a traditional restaurant might have to close. This is why heritage protection is so important. Heritage protection is a simple idea. It means keeping your country’s or your city’s heritage alive. People do this in many ways. The biggest part of heritage protection is probably preserving old buildings. A few other examples of heritage protection are making sure your children speak your traditional language, and teaching your heritage to children. The world is changing very fast. This change brings a lot of good things. But as the world is changing, it is important to remember the heritage of our parents and our grandparents.
7. The word “_it_” in paragraph 3 may refer to _________.

Choose the best answer:
Express Money Transfer is one of the quickest ways ……..help us to send money.

The 22nd SEA Games Mascot is ________Golden Buffalo.

(433)______

Rewrite the sentence
Let’s go to the Flower Festival tomorrow.

As many of you are aware, Jacob Wu, our long-standing Chief Executive Officer, ---139--- on 1 October. Twenty years ago, Mr. Wu set out to create a Hong Kong-based services firm with an international scope. ---140---. Wu Investment Services currently serves clients in seventeen countries, 95 percent of whom have chosen to invest with us for the long term. Mr. Wu will be ---141--- by Thomas Wu, his son, who has served as Vice President of Wu Investment Services for the past four years. A gathering will be held on 28 September to celebrate Mr. Wu's ---142--- career. I will send further information about the event closer to the date. Thank you.

140..................

Choose the best answer:
I often …………….. fishing with my uncle at the weekend.