Choose the best answer:
Sam didn't get much formal _______.

 

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The temperature of the earth is rising at nearly twice the rate it was 50 years ago. This rapid rate and pattern of warming, scientists have concluded, cannot be explained by natural cycles alone. The only way to explain the pattern is to include the effect of greenhouse gases (GHGs) emitted by humans. To come to a conclusion on climate change, the United Nations formed a group of scientists called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The IPCC meets every few years to review the latest scientific findings and write a report summarizing all that is known about global warming. Each report represents a consensus, or agreement, among hundreds of leading scientists. One of the first things the IPCC learned is that there are several greenhouse gases responsible for warming, and humans emit them in a variety of ways. Most come from the combustion of fossil fuels in cars, factories and electricity production. The gas responsible for the most warming is carbon dioxide, also called CO2. Other contributors include methane released from landfills and agriculture, especially from the digestive systems of grazing animals, nitrous oxide from fertilizers, gases used for refrigeration and industrial processes, and the loss of forests that would otherwise store CO2. Different greenhouse gases have very different heat-trapping abilities. Some of them can even trap more heat than CO2. A molecule of methane produces more than 20 times the warming of a molecule of CO2. Nitrous oxide is 300 times more powerful than CO2. Other gases, such as chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, which have been banned in much of the world because they also degrade the ozone layer, have heat-trapping potential thousands of times greater than CO2. But because their concentrations are much lower than CO2, none of these gases adds as much warmth to the atmosphere as CO2 does. In order to understand the effects of all the gases together, scientists tend to talk about all greenhouse gases in terms of the equivalent amount of CO2. Since 1990, yearly emissions have gone up by about 6 billion metric tons of “carbon dioxide equivalent” worldwide, more than a 20 percent increase.  
7. It can be inferred from paragraph 5 that CO2 _____

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In 1959 Xerox created the first plain paper copy machine. It was one of the most  successful products ever. The company name Xerox grew into a verb that means “to copy,” as in “Bob, can you Xerox this for me?” Around 50 years later, the same thing happened to Google. Their company name grew into a verb that means “to do an internet search.” Now everyone and their grandma knows what it means to Google it.  Unlike Xerox, Google wasn’t the first company to invent their product, not by a long shot. Lycos released their search engine in 1993. Yahoo! came out in 1994. AltaVista began serving results in 1995. Google did not come out until years later, in 1998. Though a few years difference may not seem like much, this is a major head start in the fast moving world of tech. So how did Google do it? How did they overtake their competitors who had such huge leads in time and money? Maybe one good idea made all the difference.  There are millions and millions of sites on the internet. How does a search engine know which ones are relevant to your search? This is a question that great minds have been working on for decades. To understand how Google changed the game, you need to know how search engines worked in 1998. Back then most websites looked at the words in your query. They counted how many times those words appeared on each page. Then they might return pages where the words in your query appeared the most. This system did not work well and people often had to click through pages and pages of results to find what they wanted.  Google was the first search engine that began considering links. Links are those blue underlined words that take you to other pages when you click on them. Larry Page, cofounder of Google, believed that meaningful data could be drawn from how those links connect. Page figured that websites with many links pointing at them were more important than those that had few. He was right. Google’s search results were much better than their rivals. They would soon become the world’s most used search engine.  It wasn’t just the great search results that led to Google becoming so wellliked. It also had to do with the way that they presented their product. Most of the other search engines were cluttered. Their home pages were filled with everything from news stories to stock quotes. But Google’s homepage was, and still is, clean. There’s nothing on it but the logo, the search box, and a few links. It almost appears empty. In fact, when they were first testing it, users would wait at the home page and not do anything. When asked why, they said that they were, “waiting for the rest of the page to load.” People couldn’t imagine such a clean and open page as being complete. But the fresh design grew on people once they got used to it. 
2. Which statement does the author NOT mention in the passage?

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions.

The poaching crisis wiping out Africa's elephants is costing the continent's economies millions in lost tourism revenue, according to a new study. Researchers looked at visitor and elephant data across 25 countries, and modeled financial losses from fewer visitors in protected areas due to the illegal wildlife trade, which has caused elephant numbers to plummet by more than 100,000 in the last decade. (A)

The study team combined visitor numbers across 164 protected areas in 25 countries in forest and savannah elephants, and elephant population data from 2009 to 2013, to reach a “per elephant" value in terms of tourism income.

They concluded that Africa was most likely losing $26m in tourism revenue a year. (B) Around $9m of that is lost from tourists' direct spending, such as staying at hotels and buying crafts, with the rest through indirect value in the economy such as farmers and other suppliers supporting the tourist industry.

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, found that in most cases the revenue losses were higher than paying for stronger anti-poaching measures to keep elephant populations stable. (C) Dr. Robin Naidoo, the paper's lead author and , senior conservation wildlife scientist at WWF and his team found. In the case of central Africa's forest elephants, which are harder for tourists to see and therefore attract fewer visitors, the costs of protecting them exceed the benefits from tourism. Demand from south-east Asia has seen the price of ivory triple since 2009 and it is estimated that one elephant is killed every 15 minutes. (D) Corruption, a lack of resources, and, most importantly, increasingly sophisticated poachers have hamstrung African countries' efforts to stem the trade.

Naidoo said that the research was not suggesting economic issues should be the only consideration when protecting elephants, but framing the poaching crisis as a financial one could motivate African governments and communities.

“It gives an additional reason for some groups of people, who may not necessarily be motivated by intrinsic reasons for conversation, to engage with biodiversity conservation. It makes it clear to them that it's not just in the best interests of the world to conserve this stuff, but tangible reasons for a whole different group," he said.

The word motivate in paragraph 5 is closest in meaning to ____.

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:
The weather is a national obsession in Britain, perhaps because it is so changeable. It's the national talking point, and most people watch at least one daily weather forecast. Most of the viewers imagine that the presenter does little more than arrive at the studio a few minutes before the broadcast, read the weather, and then go home.
In fact, this image is far from the truth. The two-minute bulletin which we all rely on when we need to know tomorrow's weather is the result of a hard day's work by the presenter, who is actually a highly-qualified meteorologist.
Every morning, after a weather forecaster arrives at the TV studios, his/her first task of the day is to collect the latest data from the National Meteorological Office. The information is very detailed and includes predictions, satellite and radar pictures, as well as more technical data. After gathering all the relevant material from this office, the forecaster has to translate the scientific terminology and maps into images and words which viewers can easily understand. The final broadcast is then carefully planned. The presenter decides what to say and in what order to say it. Next a “story board” is drawn up which lays out the script word for word.
The time allocated for each broadcast can also alter. This is because the weather report is screened after the news, which can vary in length. The weather forecaster doesn't always know how much time is available, which means that he/she has to be thoroughly prepared so that the material can be adapted to the time available.
What makes weather forecasting more complicated is that it has to be a live broadcast and cannot be pre-recorded. Live shows are very nerve-racking for the presenter because almost anything can go wrong. Perhaps the most worrying aspect for every weather forecaster is getting the following day's predictions wrong. Unfortunately for them, this is not an unusual occurrence; the weather is not always possible to predict accurately.
These days, a weather forecaster's job is even more complicated because they are relied upon to predict other environmental conditions. For example, in the summer the weather forecast has to include the pollen count for hay fever sufferers. Some also include reports on ultraviolet radiation intensity to help people avoid sunburn. The job of a weather forecaster is certainly far more sophisticated than just pointing at a map and describing weather conditions. It's a job for professionals who can cope with stressful and challenging conditions.

Creating a weather report is complex because .

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Political and economic reforms launched in 1986 have transformed the country from  one of the poorest in the world, with per capita income around US $100, to lower middle income status within a quarter of a century with per capita income of around US$ 2,100 by the end of 2015.  Vietnam’s per capita GDP growth since 1990 has been among the fastest in the world, averaging 5.5 percent a year since 1990, and 6.4 percent per year in the 2000s. Vietnam’s economy continued to strengthen in 2015, with estimated GDP growth rate of 6.7 percent for the whole year.  The Vietnamese population is also better educated and has a higher life expectancy than most countries with a similar per capita income. The maternal mortality ratio has dropped below the upper-middle-income country average, while under-five mortality rate has fallen by half, to a rate slightly above that average. Access to basic infrastructure has also  improved substantially. Electricity is now available to almost all households, up from less than half in 1993. Access to clean water and modern sanitation has risen from less than 50 percent of all households to more than 75 percent.  Vietnam’s Socio-Economic Development Strategy (SEDS) 2011-2020 gives attention to structural reforms, environmental sustainability, social equity, and emerging issues of macroeconomic stability. It defines three “breakthrough areas”: promoting human resources/skills development (particularly skills for modern industry and innovation), improving market institutions, and infrastructure development. In addition, the five-year Socio-Economic Development Plan 2011-2015 focused on three critical restructuring areas - the, banking sector, state-owned enterprises and public investment that are needed to achieve these objectives. The recent draft of the SEDP 20162020 acknowledges the slow progress of the reform priorities of the SEDP 2011-2015. With agriculture still accounting for almost half the labor force, and with significantly lower labor productivity than in the industry and services sectors, future gains from structural transformation could be substantial. The transformation from state to private ownership of the economy is even less advanced. The state also wields too much influence in allocating land and capital, giving rise to heavy economy wide inefficiencies. So, adjusting the role of the state to support a competitive private sector-led market economy remains a major opportunity. This will be important for enhancing productivity growth which has been stagnating for a long time.
2. What was Vietnam’s per capita GDP growth rate in 2015?

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A group of Tri-City residents and volunteers from BC Housing gathered at a  neglected therapeutic garden on the old Riverview Hospital grounds last weekend to breathe life into a green space. First planted by psychiatric nurse Art Finnie in the 1950s after he was injured on the job, Finnie’s Garden grew into one of the first experiments in horticultural  therapy. As Lauren English, director of land development for Riverview, put it, gardening as therapy was a revolutionary practice. “He understood the value of nature and how therapeutic it was before it became the rage — to find peace and to find solace and to find comfort,” added MLA Selina Robinson, who attended last Saturday’s event.  At that time, Riverview Hospital was the largest psychiatric hospital in British Columbia, with more than 5,000 patients on site. And Finnie’s was more than a garden. Beyond the rows of corn, flowers and a fish pond, residents could lounge in a picnic area or curve bowls across their own bowling green. But while the idea of Finnie’s Garden was to have a place of gathering that residents created themselves, they weren’t the first ones to make themselves at home.  Archeologists, including one on site last weekend, have found evidence Indigenous people occupied the area for thousands of years. Today, the Kwikwetlem First Nation maintains a land claim over the Riverview lands, and in its language, the area is known as Smu’q wa ala," or “Place of the Great Blue Heron”. "They found fire-altered rocks, they found boiling rocks, they found arrowheads, they found tools," said English, under the watchful eye of the group’s archeologist. “It’s not just colonial history, it’s the precontact history that goes back thousands of years.” Today, while many of the former hospital’s buildings lay in disrepair, 184 people still call the hilltop facility home, and one day in the near future, perhaps, they’ll get to use it again on their road to recovery. The event comes in a year when Treefest was cancelled because of a lack of organizers, and while the renewed work at Finnie’s Garden isn’t meant to replace Treefest, it does offer a outlet for green-thumbs without a patch of dirt.  A final community gardening event at Finnie’s Garden will likely take place in October. By removing weeds, invasive plants and adding mulch, the group plans to have the area ready to plant next spring. 
1. Which best serves as the title for the passage?

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Most languages have several levels of vocabulary that may be used by the same speakers. In English, at least three have been identified and described. Standard usage includes those words and expressions understood, used, and accepted by a majority of the speakers of a language in any situation regardless of the level of formality. As such, these words and expressions are well defined and listed in standard dictionaries. Colloquialisms, on the other hand, are familiar words and idioms that are understood by almost all speakers of a language and used in informal speech or writing, but not considered acceptable for more formal situations. Almost all idiomatic expressions are colloquial language. Slang, refers to words and expressions understood by a large number of speakers but not accepted as appropriate formal usage by the majority. Colloquial expressions and even slang may be found in standard dictionaries but will be so identified. Both colloquial usage and slang are more common in speech than writing. Colloquial speech often passes into standard speech. Some slang also passes into standard speech, but other slang expressions enjoy momentary popularity followed by obscurity. In some cases, the majority never accepts certain slang phrases but nevertheless retains them in their collective memories. Every generation seems to require its own set of words to describe familiar objects and events. It has been pointed out by a number of linguists that three cultural conditions are necessary for the creation of a large body of slang expressions. First, the introduction and acceptance of new objects and situations in the society; second, a diverse population with a large number of subgroups; third, association among the subgroups and the majority population. Finally, it is worth noting that the terms "standard", "colloquial", and "slang" exist only as abstract labels for scholars who study language. Only a tiny number of the speakers of any language will be aware that they are using colloquial or slang expressions. Most speakers of English will, during appropriate situations, select and use three types of expressions.
3. The word "obscurity" in paragraph 3 could best be replaced by:

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We find that bright children are rarely held back by mixed- ability teaching. On the contrary, both their knowledge and experience are enriched. We feel that there are many disadvantages in streaming pupils. It does not take into account the fact that children develop at different rates. It can have a bad effect on both the bright and the not-so-bright child. After all, it can be quite discouraging to be at the bottom of the top grade! Besides, it is rather unreal to grade people just according to their intellectual ability. This is only one aspect of their total personality. We are concerned to develop the abilities of all our pupils to the full, not just their academic ability. We also value personal qualities and social skills, and we find that mixed- ability teaching contributes to all these aspects of learning. In our classrooms, we work in various ways. The pupils often work in groups; this gives them the opportunity to learn to co-operate, to share, and to develop leadership skills. They also learn how to cope with personal problems as well as learning how to think, to make decisions, to analyze and evaluate, and to communicate effectively. The pupils learn from each other as well as from the teachers. Sometimes the pupils work in pairs; sometimes they work on individual tasks and assignments; and they can do this at their own speed. They also have some formal class teaching when this is appropriate. We encourage our pupils to use the library, and we teach them the skills they need in order to do this effectively. An advanced pupil can do advanced work; it does not matter what age the child is. We expect our pupils to do their best, not their least, and we give them every encouragement to attain this goal.
3. The author argues that a teacher's chief concern should be the development of the pupils'.........

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New technology helped cities grow. Elevated trains carried passengers over (1) ____ streets. In 1887, the first electric streetcar system opened in Richmond, Virginia. Ten years later, the nation’s first electric subway trains began running beneath the streets of Boston. Public transportation gave (2) ____ to suburbs, living areas on the outskirts of a city. People no longer had to live in cities to work in cities. Steel bridges also accelerated suburban growth. The Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883, (3) ____ the city center in Manhattan to outlying Brooklyn. As a result, New York City was able to spread out to house its growing population. Cities began to expand upward as well as outward. In 1885, architects in Chicago constructed the first 10-story building. People called it a “skyscraper” because its top seemed to touch the sky. By 1900, (4) ____ skyscrapers up to 30 stories high towered over cities. Electric elevators whisked office workers to the upper floors. As cities grew outward from their old downtown sections, living patterns changed. Many cities took on a similar shape. Poor families crowded (5) ____ the oldest sections at the city’s center. Middle-class people lived farther out in row houses or new apartment buildings. The rich built fine homes on the outskirts of the city

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Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are now considered the future of lighting due to a lower energy requirement to run, a lower monthly price tag, and a longer life than traditional incandescent light bulbs. Nick Holonyak, an American scientist at General Electric, accidently invented the red LED light while trying to create a laser in the early 1960s. As with other inventors, the principle that some semiconductors glowed when an electric current was applied had been known since the early 1900s, but Holonyak was the first to patent it for use as a light fixture. Within a few years, yellow and green LEDs were added to the mix and used in several applications including indicator lights, calculator displays, and traffic lights, according to the DOE. The blue LED was created in the early 1990s by Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura, a group of Japanese and American scientists, and for which they won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics. The blue LED allowed scientists to create white LED light bulbs by coating the diodes with phosphor Today, lighting choices have expanded and people can choose different types of light bulbs, including compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs work by heating a gas that produces ultraviolet light and LED bulbs. Several lighting companies are pushing the boundaries of what light bulbs can do, including Phillips and Stack. Phillips is one of several companies that have created wireless light bulbs that can be controlled via smartphone app. The Phillips Hue uses LED technology that can quickly be turned on or off or dimmed by a flick on a smart phone screen and can also be programmed. The higher-end Hue light bulbs can even be set to a large range of colors (only about sixteen million) and synced with music, movies, and video games. Stack, begun by engineers from Tesla and NASA, developed a smart light bulb using LED technology with a wide range of functions. It can automatically sense the ambient lighting and adjust as needed, it turns off and on via motion sensor when someone enters the room, can be used as a wake up alert, and even adjusts color throughout the day to fit with human’s natural circadian cycles and patterns of natural light. The light bulbs also have a built-in learning program that adapts to inputs given by residents over time. And all of these functions can be programmed or monitored from any smart phone or tablet. It is estimated that Stack smart light bulbs can use about sixty percent less energy than a typical LED light bulb and lasts between twenty and thirty thousand hours depending on the model . These light bulbs are compatible (or soon will be) with many of the options for turning an entire home into a smart home including usage with Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Apple HomeKit.
6. The word “dimmed” in paragraph 5 can best be replace by ____

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There are many strange superstitions in the world. The most common one is related to black cats, (1) ____ are the source of hundreds of unlucky superstitions. It’s a sign of bad luck if they walk in front of you or you step on their tails. They even bring bad luck into a house if they sneeze inside! This superstition dates (2) ____ to the Middle Ages when they became associated with witches and evil spirits. Another common superstition is about walking under a ladder. A more (3) ____ explanation can be traced back to ancient Egypt. The early Egyptians believed that the shape of the Pyramids had a special power. It was considered very bad luck to break the “power” of this shape and that’s exactly what walking under a ladder would do! In addition, in Roman times, people (4) ____ the habit of looking at themselves in pools of water. Some believed that these reflections were in fact “glimpses of the soul”. Any disruption to the water in the pool would bring bad luck to the person looking in it. This superstition lives (5)_________the fear of bad luck from breaking a mirror

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Children’s behaviour has worsened over the past five years, according to a survey of  teachers which found that a fifth thought girls were more likely to cause trouble than boys. The survey, published after teachers at a Lancashire school went on strike over discipline, found low-level disruption, including chatting and “horsing around”, was the biggest problem. Boys were more likely to be physically aggressive while girls tended to ostracise other pupils. The behaviour of boys was more of a challenge than that of girls but the actions of each sex had deteriorated, according to 56.5% of staff surveyed by the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL).  Among male pupils the most challenging behaviour for teachers was physical aggression, such as pushing, spitting, kicking and hitting. A secondary teacher quoted in the survey said boys were usually aggressive with other pupils, while girls tended to call one another names. Teachers criticised a lack of role models in the home. A primary teacher said: “The boys are far more willing to be aggressive to adults, verbally and even physically. There don’t seem to be any parental boundaries set of what is an appropriate way to speak and deal with another adult.” Teachers at Darwen Vale high school, Lancashire, walked out over unruly pupil behaviour this month. They said children challenged them to fights and threatened to film lessons and post them online. The survey of more than 850 teachers, heads and other school staff found that more than 21% thought girls’ behaviour was more challenging than boys, compared with 68% who said male pupils caused more trouble. In schools that have excluded pupils, 57% said more boys and 5% said more girls had been excluded. A department head in a primary school told the survey, carried out in March, that “classes with a majority of boys tend to be louder, less co-operative and harder to teach”. Nearly half of the staff surveyed said boys’ bravado was behind their disruption. For girls, the most likely trigger was a break-up between friends. A primary school teacher from Bedfordshire said: "Boys are generally more physical and their behaviour is more noticeable. Girls often say nasty things, which end up disrupting the lesson just as much as the boys, as other children get upset and can’t focus on their work. They are usually the ones who refuse to comply with instructions." Some staff had noticed girls’ behaviour worsening.” A teaching assistant from Weston-super-Mare said: “Girls are definitely getting more violent, with gangs of girls in school who are getting worse than the gangs of boys.” The ATL annual conference in Liverpool on Monday is due to debate a motion expressing concern at increasing numbers of girls being excluded from secondary school.  Government figures for 2008-9 showed that boys represented 78% of the total number of permanent exclusions from schools in England. This proportion was unchanged from the year before. The ATL general secretary, Mary Bousted, said: "Staff get ground down daily by the chatting and messing around, which disrupts lessons for other pupils and takes the pleasure out of teaching. Even more worrying is the physical aggression, most often among boys but also among some girls, which puts other pupils and staff at risk. Schools need to have firm and consistent discipline policies and work with parents to keep schools and colleges safe places for pupils and staff alike." The education bill, now going through the Commons, will give teachers the right to search pupils for banned items and will remove the requirement to give parents a day’s notice of detention. The education secretary, Michael Gove, said the measures in the bill would “restore discipline” in the classroom.
3. Which of the following is NOT true about the schoolboys in paragraph 2?

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The cities in the United States have been the most visible sponsors and beneficiaries  of projects that place art in public places. They have shown exceptional imagination in applying the diverse forms of contemporary art to a wide variety of purposes. The activities observed in a number of “pioneer” cities sponsoring art in public places - a broadening exploration of public sites, an increasing awareness among both sponsors and the public of the varieties of contemporary artistic practice, and a growing public enthusiasm - are increasingly characteristic of cities across the country. With many cities now undergoing renewed development, opportunities are continuously emerging for the inclusion or art in new or renewed public environments, including buildings, plazas, parks, and transportation facilities. The result of these activities is a group of artworks that reflect the diversity of contemporary art and the varying character and goals of the sponsoring communities.  In sculpture, the projects range from a cartoonlike Mermaid in Miami Beach by Roy Lichtenstein to a small forest planted in New York City by Alan Sonfist. The use of murals followed quickly upon the use of sculpture and has brought to public sites the work of artists as different as the realist Thomas Hart Benton and the Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg. The specialized requirements of particular urban situations have further expanded the use of art in public places: in Memphis, sculptor Richard Hunt has created a monument to Martin Luther King, Jr., who was slain there; in New York, Dan Flavin and Bill Brand have contributed neon and animation works to the enhancement of mass transit facilities. And in numerous cities, art is being raised as a symbol of the commitment to revitalize urban areas.  By continuing to sponsor projects involving a growing body of art in public places, cities will certainly enlarge the situations in which the public encounters and grows familiar with the various forms of contemporary art. Indeed, cities are providing artists with an opportunity to communicate with a new and broader audience. Artists are recognizing the distinction between public and private spaces, and taking that into account when executing their public commissions. They are working in new, often more durable media, and on an unaccustomed scale.
7. The word “that” in paragraph 3 refers to ____

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My mom is a pretty talented pianist. She reads music very well and loves to play  Chopin and various other classical artists. One of my earliest memories involves sitting under her piano bench while she played. It gave her a lot of joy and a lot of personal pride, I think. I trust that she naturally wanted those things for me when she enrolled me in piano lessons when I was about seven years old.  I hated them. I was scared of my teacher. I hated practicing. I hated the songs I was being forced to learn. I hated reading music. I was a young kid, and there were other things I wanted to do instead. It just didn’t interest me, and no amount of begging and pleading on my mother’s part could get me to enjoy practicing. One thing in particular that she used to say as she was begging me to practice was, “One day, when you’re older, you will cherish the ability to sit down and play.” Nevertheless, after a couple years of once-a-week torture, she finally allowed me to quit.  Years went by. I switched schools when I was 11 years old, got a new best friend, and got interested in music. This was a critical turning point. My best friend loved the band Bush and lots of other alternative bands of the ‘90s, and listening to them unlocked a whole new sonic world for me. I fell in love, fell completely and totally in love, with rock music.  My friend taught me the form for a power chord on her acoustic guitar. If you know how to play a power chord, you can play or at least convincingly fake pretty much every single rock song in the world. It was like someone had given me my first hit of a powerful opiate.  I spent hours practicing in my room. Hours sounding out my favourite songs. More hours playing along with those songs in front of my mirror, pretending I was Scott Weiland, Dolores O’Riordan, Chris Cornell, or my personal favourite Louise Post (of Veruca Salt). I unlocked a talent within myself that had gone obscenely undiscovered and undeveloped when I was a young child banging my head against a piano keyboard, trying and failing to read a piece of music - I could play the guitar by ear. I just hadn’t had the time to figure that out because my mom was trying so hard to get me to do something that did not come naturally to me and that I had no desire to do.
2. The writer wrote she disliked all of the following EXCEPT ____

Choose the best answer:
Jack always wants to achieve high goals. He’s so ___________.

Each sentence has a mistake. Find it by chosing A B C or D 

Affecting by the Western cultures, Vietnamese young people’s attitudes towards love and marriage hava dramatically changed

Choose the best answer:
The ____________ of Tokyo in 2019 is more than 9.200 million.

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Alexander Hamilton was born on January 11, 1755 or 1757 in the West Indies. Due to his mother’s lack of marital status, Hamilton was not seen as a legitimate child and was thus denied access to church schools. When his mother died he was adopted by a merchant in Nevis, where he worked as a clerk. During his time in Nevis, Hamilton continued to write; one of his essays impressed the community leaders so much that they worked together and collected funds to send Hamilton to the colonies. Hamilton served in the revolutionary war, during which time he worked his way through battles and earned himself a place aiding General Washington. After the war, Hamilton was elected into the Congress of the Confederation. He was dissatisfied with the decentralized government that was set up and the inability to raise money from the states to pay the soldiers. Hamilton was involved in the Constitution Convention but did not fully agree with the document; despite his disagreements, he promoted the document because he believed it was a vast improvement over the Articles of Confederation. He pushed the ratification of the Constitution, teaming up with John Jay and James Madison to write the Federalist papers, which were often cited when pushing for the Constitution’s ratification. Alexander Hamilton was appointed as the country’s first Secretary of The Treasury on September 11, 1789. During his time as Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton helped write economic policies, develop the funding of state debts, establish the national bank, create a national currency, a system of tariffs, and a peaceful trade relationship with Britain. After his time in politics finished, Alexander Hamilton went back to New York to practice law. He died in a duel with Aaron Burr in Weehawken, New Jersey on July 12, 1804  
1. Which best serves as the title for the passage? 

Read the following passage and choose the best answer (A, B, C, D):
Every summer, when the results of university entrance exam come out, many newspaper stories are published about students who are top-scorers across the country. Most portray students as hard-working, studious, smart and, generally, from low-income families. They are often considered heroes or heroines by their families, communes, villages and communities. And they symbolise the efforts made to lift them, and their relatives, out of poverty. The students are often too poor to attend any extra-classes, which make their achievements more illustrious and more newsworthy. While everyone should applaud the students for their admirable efforts, putting too much emphasis on success generates some difficult questions. If other students look up to them as models, of course it’s great. However, in a way, it contributes to society’s attitude that getting into university is the only way to succeed. For those who fail, their lives are over. It should be noted that about 1.3 million high school students take part in the annual university entrance exams and only about 300,000 of them pass. What’s about the hundreds of thousands who fail? Should we demand more stories about those who fail the exam but succeed in life or about those who quit university education at some level and do something else unconventional? “I personally think that it’s not about you scoring top in an entrance exam or get even into Harvard. It’s about what you do for the rest of your life,” said Tran Nguyen Le Van, 29. He is the founder of a website, vexere.com, that passengers can use to book bus tickets online and receive tickets via SMS. His business also arranges online tickets via mobile phones and email. Van dropped out of his MBA at the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona in the United States. His story has caught the attention of many newspapers and he believes more coverage should be given to the youngsters who can be role-models in the start-up community. Getting into university, even with honours, is just the beginning. "We applaud them and their efforts and obviously that can give them motivation to do better in life. However, success requires more than just scores," Van said. Van once told a newspaper that his inspiration also came from among the world’s most famous drop-outs, such as Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook or Bill Gates who also dropped out of Harvard University. Alarming statistics about unemployment continues to plague us. As many as 162,000 people with some kind of degree cannot find work, according to Labour Ministry’s statistics this month. An emphasis on getting into university does not inspire students who want to try alternative options. At the same time, the Ministry of Education and Training is still pondering on how to reform our exam system, which emphasises theories, but offers little to develop critical thinking or practice. Vu Thi Phuong Anh, former head of the Centre for Education Testing and Quality Assessment at Viet Nam National University in HCM City said the media should also monitor student successes after graduation. She agreed there were many success stories about young people, but added that it was imbalanced if students taking unconventional paths were not also encouraged. Viet Nam is, more than ever, in desperate need of those who think outside the box. Time for us to recognise talent, no matter where it comes from or how.
2. What is NOT stated in the passage about the top-scorers in the entrance exam?

Read the following passage and choose the best answer (A, B, C, D):
Money habits matter a lot in a relationship, even if you’re not married or living together, concludes Melissa A Curran, an associate professor at the University of Arizona, in a new study published in the Journal of Family and Economic Issues. That’s why she recommends being picky when it comes to dating. “Young adults should choose their romantic partner wisely,” Curran tells CNBC Make It. She and her colleagues assessed over 500 young twenty-somethings in committed relationships and had them rate their health and overall life satisfaction. She asked them questions related to their partners’ financial responsibility, such as, Do they spend within a budget? And, Do they usually pay off their credit cards in full? The researchers found that the more responsible the participants perceived their partners to be with money, the higher their own sense of well-being and the happier they were with their relationships. The opposite was also true. Participants who thought their partners were bad with money had a lower sense of well-being and felt less committed to the relationship. “This finding makes sense developmentally as the young adults are transitioning to adulthood,” says Curran. “It would make sense for them to draw upon romantic partners in terms of financial socialization agents.” By socialization agents, she means people who can teach and influence the participants on matters related to money. The idea is that the financial habits of whoever you’re dating can rub off on you. If your partner is bad with money, you might become bad with money too, which in turn affects your life overall, since the researchers also confirmed that your own financial habits definitely affect your well-being. For many young adults, parents are the most influential socialization agents. So, in this study, Curran also asked the participants about what their parents expected of them when it came to their finances. Did their parents, for example, expect them to track their spending? The researchers found that high expectations from an involved parent led the participants to perform better on a financial literacy test. But, unlike romantic partners, they did not seem to influence well-being. If you’re bothered by your significant other’s over-spending or general irresponsibility with money, Curran and her colleagues recommends talking things through. “Having discussions about finances and making financial decisions together helps couples become closer and more satisfied with their relationships.”
3. According to paragraph 2, what is NOT correct about the research of Melissa A Curran?