Choose the item among A, B, C or D that the best answers the question about the passage:

"The nuclear family, consisting of a mother, father, and their children, may be more an American ideal than an American reality. Of course, the so-called traditional American family was always more varied than we had been led to believe, reflecting the very different racial, ethnic, class, and religious customs among American groups.
 The most recent government statistics reveal that only about one third of all current American families fit the traditional mold and another third consists of married couples who either have no children or have none still living at home. Of the final one, about 20 percent of the total number of American households are single people, usually women over sixty-five years old. A small percentage, about 3 percent of the total, consists of unmarried people who choose to live together, and the rest, about 7 percent, are single, usually divorced parents, with at least one child. Today, these varied family types are typical, and therefore, normal. Apparently, many Americans are achieving supportive relationships in family forms other than the traditional one."

4. According to the passage, married couples whose children have grown or who have no children represent______

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:
The economic expansion prompted by the Second World War triggered a spectacular population boom in the West. Of course, the region was no stranger to population booms. Throughout much of its history, western settlement had been characterized by spurts, rather than by a pattern of gradual and steady population growth, beginning with the gold and silver rushes of the 1850's and 1860's. The decade after the First World War - the 1920's - witnessed another major surge of people pouring into the West, particularly into urban areas. But the economic depression of the 1930's brought this expansion to a halt; some of the more sparsely settled parts of the region actually lost population as migrants sought work in more heavily industrialized areas. By 1941 when the United States entered the Second World War and began to mobilize, new job opportunities were created in the western part of the nation.

If the expansion of industries, such as shipbuilding and aircraft manufacturing, was most striking on the pacific coast, it also affected interior cities like Denver, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City. Equally dramatic were the effects of the establishment of aluminum plants in Oregon and Washington and the burgeoning steel industry in Utah and California. The flow of people into these areas provided an enormous impetus to the expansion of the service industries - banks, health care services and schools. Although strained to the limit by the influx of newcomers, western communities welcomed the vast reservoir of new job opportunities. At the same time, the unprecedented expansion of government installations in the West, such as military bases, created thousands of new civilian openings. As land had served as a magnet for western migrants in the late nineteenth century, so wartime mobilization set in motion another major expansion of population. Indeed, it could be said that the entire western United States became a giant boomtown during the Second World War. This was especially true of California. Of the more than eight million people who moved into the West in the decade after 1940, almost one-half went to the Pacific coast. In fact, between 1940 and 1950, California's population surged by more than three million people.

The passage suggests that industrialization in the West led to all of the following EXCEPT     .

Read the following passage and choose the best answer (A, B, C, D):
The position of sport in today’s society has changed out of all recognition. People no longer seem to think of sports as ‘just a game’ – to be watched or played for the (1) _________ of enjoyment. Instead, it has become big business worldwide. It has become accepted practice for leading companies to provide sponsorship. TV companies pay large sums of money to screen important matches or competitions. The result has been huge rewards for athletes, some of (2) _________ are now very wealthy, particularly top footballers, golfers and tennis players. (3) ________ , it is not unusual for some athletes to receive large fees on top of their salary, for advertising products or making personal appearances. A trend towards shorter working hours means that people generally tend to have more free time, both to watch and to take in sporting activity; sport has become a significant part of the recreation industry that we now rely (4) _________ to fill our leisure hours. Professional sport is a vital part of that industry, providing for millions of (5) _________ people all over the world.

Choose the best answer:
My teacher _______ while he _______ a car.

Read the reading below carefully, and then complete it with the best option A, B, C or D given below:
Football, game played on a rectangular (1) _______ by two opposing teams with an inflated leather ball that is roughly (2) _______ in shape. The object of the game is to score points by carrying the ball (3) _______ the opponent’s goal line or by (4) _______ the ball through the opponent’s goalposts. Football is (5) _______ a full-contact sport, meaning that play involves bodily contact by means of checking, blocking, grabbing, and tackling.

 Although I did not totally agree _____ feminist’s policies, I certainly admired their audacity, dedication and courage.

(486)______

 If I _____10 years younger, I ____ the job.
(247)________

Choose the best answer:
He's a choreographer who has drawn _____ from Javanese dance.

Read the following passage and choose the best answer (A, B, C, D):
The penny press, which emerged in the United Sates during the 1830’s, was 1 a powerful agent of mass communication. These newspapers were little dailies, generally four pages in length, written for the mass taste. They differed from the 3 staid, formal presentation of the conservative press, with its emphasis on political and literary topics. The new papers were brief and cheap, emphasizing sensational reports of police courts and juicy scandals as well as human interest 5 stories. Twentieth – century journalism was already foreshadowed in the penny press of the 1830’s. 7 The New York Sun, founded in 1833, was the first successful penny paper, and it was followed two years later by the New York Herald, published by James 9 Gordon Bennett. Not long after, Horace Greeley issued the New York Tribune, which was destined to become the most influential paper in America. Greeley 11 gave space to the issues that deeply touched the American people before the Civil War – abolitionism, temperance, free homesteads, Utopian cooperative settlements, and the problems of labor. The weekly edition of the Tribune, with 13 100,000 subscribers, had a remarkable influence in rural areas, especially in Western communities. 15 Americans were reputed to be the most avid readers of periodicals in the world. An English observer enviously calculated that, in 1829, the number of 17 newspapers circulated in Great Britain was enough to reach only one out of every thirty – six inhabitants weekly; Pennsylvania in that same year had a 19 newspaper circulation which reaches one out of every four inhabitants weekly. Statistics seemed to justify the common belief that Americans were devoted to periodicals. Newspapers in the United States increased from 1,200 in 1833 to 21 3000 by the early 1860’s, on the eve of the Civil War. This far exceeded the number and circulation of newspapers in England and France.
6. The word remarkable in line 14 is closest in meaning to: 

Balzer, _____ linguistic researcher, reported that approximately 75% of classroom management behavior was nonverbal.

(217)______

Read the following passage and choose the best answer (A, B, C, D):
Aspirin's origins go back at least as early as 1758. In that year, Englishman Edward Stone noticed a distinctive bitter flvor in the bark of the willow tree. To Stone, this particular bark seem to have much in common with "Peruvian Bark", which had been used medicinally since the 1640s to bring down fevers and to treat malaria, stone decided to test the effectiveness of the willow bark. He obtained some, pulverized it into tiny pieces, and conducted experiments on its properties. His tests demonstrated that this pulverized willow bark was effective both in reducing high temperatures and in relieving aches and pains. In 1763, stone presented his tiding to the British Royal Society. Several decades later, further studies on the medicinal value of the willow bark were being conducted by two Italian scientists. These chemists, Brugnatelli and Fontana, determined that the active chemical that was responsible for the medicinal characteristics in the willow bark was the chemical salicin, which is the active ingredient of today's aspirin. The name "aspirin" is the trade name of the drug based on the chemical salicin, properly known as acetylsalicylic acid.The trade name "aspirin" was invented for the drug in the 1890s by the Bayer Drug Company in Germany. The fist bottles of aspirin actually went on sale to the publicjust prior to the turn of the century, in 1899.
1. According to the passage, aspirin originated: 

Choose the best answer:
Look! The girls ……….. in the schoolyard.

Read the passage below carefully, and then choose the best answer:
It’s in Your Genes
Every human being has about 25,000 genes. Your genes are part of your DNA. They give your body instructions on how to develop. For example, if your genes tell your body to build long, thin fingers, then you will have long, thin fingers. Your genes come from your parents, and they decide everything about you. They decide your hair colour, your eye colour, your height, and so on. Genes are still a bit of a mystery to scientists, but they are learning new things about them all the time. One issue that people often debate is this: Do our genes influence our personalities? These days, most people agree that the answer to this question is yes. Recent studies have shown that genes especially influence our self-control and our sense of purpose. Your sense of purpose is your desire to have goals in your life. If a person really wants to accomplish something and do well in life, he or she has a sense of purpose. A person who does not care about goals has no sense of purpose. Although scientists agree that our genes influence our personalities, there is another question. How much do they influence us? Can we control ourselves, or do our genes control us? People everywhere are still debating this issue. So far, we don’t really have an answer. Genes also affect your health. If a gene has a problem, it is called a mutated gene. Some mutated genes can cause diseases. That is why if a person has a certain health problem, his or her child is more likely to have that same problem. The child also has the mutated gene. As scientists and doctors learn more about genes, they are also developing a new kind of medicine: gene therapy. Therapy is help for a mental or a physical problem. Gene therapy means fixing or replacing mutated genes. Scientists are still experimenting on gene therapy. It is possible that in the future, gene therapy will help doctors prevent and cure diseases that are caused by mutated genes.
5. What might a person with a strong sense of purpose do?

A surprising number of popular spectator sports, for example football or baseball, (1)______ in Europe or the USA in the nineteenth century. This did not happen by chance. It was the (2) ______ of changes in the way people lived in those places at that time. Until then, more people lived In the country than in towns. They worked in small groups and had no regular time off. All this changed with the growth of factories and industry in the nineteenth century, first in Europe and (3) ______. In the USA. For the first time, most people began to live in towns, and they found themselves with regular free time. They had more leisure time than ever before. This resulted in the need for organized entertainment. Suitable games developed or were invented, typically team games, in which the crowd could (4) ______ sides and become involved. This gave people some of the entertainment they need in their free time. The recent explosion in TV, with the introduction of satellite and cable channels, has caused an increase in (5) ______ for sports as entertainment. The money TV has broughtto games such as football, tennis and baseball means that spectator sports will certainly go on playing an important part in our lives.

(63)________

Choose the best answer:
I do not believe that this scheme is _________of our serious consideration.

Read the reading below carefully, and then complete it with the best option A, B, C or D given below:
(1) ........ .........most scientists dismiss tales of out-of-body experiences on the operating table as dreams and delusions, there are some cases which seem to defy rational explanation. Take Margaret Frobisher. In 2003, she was undergoing a routine operation under general anaesthetic at Sansdown Hospital in Kent. There were serious complications, (2) ......................... , and her heart stopped beating. Try (3) ......................... they might, the surgeon and anaesthetist were unable to resuscitate her. Finally, after eight minutes, they succeeded. (4) ......................... having been clinically dead, Margaret suffered no brain damage and no adverse side effects. The story doesn't stop there, (5) ......................... . When the anaesthetist went to visit her in her hospital bed, Margaret Frobisher recounted an amazing story. She said she vividly remembered floating above the operating table. And (6) ......................... her never having been conscious in that room at any time, she described the room and the resuscitation attempt in great detail. She said that (7) ......................... three of the walls were bright white, one was dark grey. This was true. She also said that, on the top of a cabinet in a corner of the operating theatre, there was an old book. (8) ......................... the anaesthetist didn't - and couldn't - believe her, she checked. There, just as Margaret Frobisher had described it, was the book. (9) ......................... as they tried, no one at the hospital could explain how Margaret could have known about the book. Even (10) ......................... one does not believe in a 'soul' or in life after death, it is difficult to explain what happened in that operating theatre when Margaret Frobisher's heart stopped beating.

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.

(4)...........................

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:
At 7pm on a dark, cold November evening, thousands of people are making their way across a vast car park. They’re not here to see a film, or the ballet, or even the circus. They are all here for what is, bizarrely, a global phenomenon: they are here to see Holiday on Ice. Given that most people don’t seem to be acquainted with anyone who’s ever been, the show’s statistics are extraordinary: nearly 300 million people have seen Holiday on Ice since it began in 1943; it is the most popular live entertainment in the world.
But what does the production involve? And why are so many people prepared to spend their lives travelling round Europe in caravans in order to appear in it? It can't be glamorous, and it's undoubtedly hard work. The backstage atmosphere is an odd mix of gym class and workplace. A curtained-off section at the back of the arena is laughably referred to as the girls' dressing room, but is more accurately described as a corridor, with beige, cracked walls and cheap temporary tables set up along the length of it. Each girl has a small area littered with pots of orange make-up, tubes of mascara and long false eyelashes.
As a place to work, it must rank pretty low down the scale: the area round the ice-rink is grey and mucky with rows of dirty blue and brown plastic seating and red carpet tiles. It's an unimpressive picture, but the show itself is an unquestionably vast, polished global enterprise: the lights come from a firm in Texas, the people who make the audio system are in California, but Montreal supplies the smoke effects; former British Olympic skater Robin Cousins is now creative director for the company and conducts a vast master class to make sure they're ready for the show's next performance.
The next day, as the music blares out from the sound system, the cast start to go through their routines under Cousins’ direction. Cousins says, The aim is to make sure they're all still getting to exactly the right place on the ice at the right time - largely because the banks of lights in the ceiling are set to those places, and if the skaters are all half a metre out they'll be illuminating empty ice. Our challenge, ‘he continues, ‘is to produce something they can sell in a number of countries at the same time. My theory is that you take those things that people want to see and you give it to them, but not in the way they expect to see it. You try to twist it. And you have to find music that is challenging to the skaters, because they have to do it every night.’
It may be a job which he took to pay the rent, but you can't doubt his enthusiasm. “The only place you'll see certain skating moves is an ice show,” he says, “because you're not allowed to do them in competition. It's not in the rules. So the ice show world has things to offer which the competitive world just doesn't.” Cousin knows what he's talking about because he skated for the show himself when he stopped competing - he was financially unable to retire. He learnt the hard way that you can't put on an Olympic performance every night. “I'd be thinking, these people have paid their money, now do your stuff, and I suddenly thought”, “I really can't cope. I'm not enjoying it”. The solution, he realised, was to give 75 per cent every night, rather than striving for the sort of twice-a-year excellence which won him medals.
To be honest, for those of us whose only experience of ice-skating is watching top-class Olympic skaters, some of the movements can look a bit amateurish, but then, who are we to judge? Equally, it's impossible not to be swept up in the whole thing; well, you'd have to try pretty hard not to enjoy it.

Which of the following is the writer’s conclusion of Holiday on Ice?

Choose the best answer:
Which ____________ is the documentary on?

MANCHESTER (10 April) – Sparkle Pro Enterprises, a leading Belgium-based ---143--- of cleaning products, is expanding its territory. The company has just opened its first plant in the United States, in Indianapolis. For more than forty years, Sparkle Pro has been making and distributing household and industrial cleaners to a wide range of vendors, including retail outlets and hotel chains, throughout Europe. ---144---.
The Indianapolis facility will require the company to hire 300 additional employees ---145--- the end of this year in order for it to achieve full capacity. According to Egan Bretz, the new director of North American operations, Sparkle Pro is confident that it will be able to train a large number of personnel quickly. Mr. Bretz expects no significant ---146--- in meeting these needs.

145.............

We are pleased to announce that the installation of the new manufacturing equipment in our main plant has been completed. The new machines---131--- workflow by allowing for flexibility in production. With six mixing tanks of ---132--- sizes, we expect to be able to fill a wider range of orders, from small to very large. This ---133--- is an important way to ensure that Balm Manufacturing continues to be a leader in the fragrance industry.---134---. Jim Martel, who is organizing this effort, will contact each of you soon with details.

131. .................