Choose the letter A, B, C or D to complete the passage below

   It may be that media have made the AI safety debate seem more (1)_______than it really is. After all, fear sells, and articles using out-of-context quotes to (2) _______ imminent doom can generate more clicks than nuanced and balanced ones. (3) _______, two people who only know about each other’s positions from media quotes are likely (4)_______ think they disagree more than they really do. For example, a techno-skeptic who only read about Bill Gates’s position in a British tabloid may mistakenly think Gates believes superintelligence to be imminent. Similarly, someone in the beneficial-AI movement (5) _______ who knows nothing about Andrew Ng’s position except his quote about overpopulation on Mars may mistakenly think he doesn’t care about AI safety, whereas in fact, he does. The crux is simply that because Ng’s timeline estimates are longer, he naturally tends to prioritize short-term AI challenges over long-term ones.

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

Bees, classified into over 10,000 species, are insects found in almost every part of the world except the northernmost and southernmost regions. One commonly known species is the honeybee, the only bee that produces honey and wax. Humans use the wax in making candles, lipsticks, and other products, and they use the honey as a substance that people eat to maintain life and growth. While gathering the nectar and pollen with which they make honey, bees are simultaneously helping to fertilize the flowers on which they land. Many fruits and vegetables would not survive if bees did not carry the pollen from blossom to blossom.
Bees live in a structured environment and social structure within a hive, which is a nest with storage space for the honey. The different types of bees each perform a unique function. The worker bee carries nectar to hive in a special stomach called a honey stomach. Other workers make beeswax and shape it into a honeycomb, which is a waterproof mass of six-sided compartments, or cells. The queen lays eggs in completed cells. As the workers build more cells, the queen lays more eggs.
All workers, like the queen, are female, but the workers are smaller than the queen. The male honeybees are called drones; they do no work and cannot sting. They are developed from unfertilized eggs, and their only job is to impregnate a queen. The queen must be fertilized in order to lay more worker eggs. During the season when less honey is available and the drone is of no further use, the workers block the drones from eating the honey so that they will starve to death.

The word “simultaneously” is closest meaning to  ........

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William Sydney Porter (1862-1910), who wrote under the pseudonym of O. Henry, was born in North Carolina. His only formal education was to attend his Aunt Lina’s school until the age of fifteen, where he developed his lifelong love of books. By 1881 he was a licensed pharmacist. However, within a year, on the recommendation of a medical colleague of his Father’s, Porter moved to La Salle County in Texas for two years herding sheep. During this time, Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary was his constant companion, and Porter gained a knowledge of ranch life that he later incorporated into many of his short stories. He then moved to Austin for three years, and during this time the first recorded use of his pseudonym appeared, allegedly derived from his habit of calling “Oh, Henry” to a family cat. In 1887, Porter married Athol Estes. He worked as a draftsman, then as a bank teller for the First National Bank.
In 1894 Porter founded his own humor weekly, the “Rolling Stone”, a venture that failed within a year, and later wrote a column for the Houston Daily Post. In the meantime, the First National Bank was examined, and the subsequent indictment of 1886 stated that Porter had embezzled funds. Porter then fled to New Orleans, and later to Honduras, leaving his wife and child in Austin. He returned in 1897 because of his wife’s continued ill-health, however she died six months later. Then, in 1898 Porter was found guilty and sentenced to five years imprisonment in Ohio. At the age of thirty five, he entered prison as a defeated man; he had lost his job, his home, his wife, and finally his freedom. He emerged from prison three years later, reborn as O. Henry, the pseudonym he now used to hide his true identity. He wrote at least twelve stories in jail, and after re-gaining his freedom, went to New York City, where he published more than 300 stories and gained fame as America’s favorite short Story writer. Porter married again in 1907, but after months of poor health, he died in New York City at the age of forty-eight in 1910. O. Henry’s stories have been translated all over the world.

Why did the author write the passage?

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Every year about two million people visit Mount Rushmore, were the faces of four U.S presidents were carved in granite by sculptor Gutzon Borglum and his son, the late Lincoln Borglum. The creation of the Mount Rushmore monument Line took 14 years – from 1927 to 1941 – and nearly a million dollars. There were times when money was difficult to come by and many people were jobless. To move more than 400,000 tons of rock, Borglum hired laid-off workers from the closed-down mines in the Black Hills area. He taught these men to dynamite, drill, carve, and finish the granite as they were hanging in midair in his specially devised chairs, which had many safety features. Borglum was proud of the fact that no workers were killed or severely injured during the years of blasting and carving.
During the carving, many changes in original design had to be made to keep the carved heads free of large fissures that were uncovered. However, not all the cracks could be avoided, so Borglum concocted a mixture of granite dust, white lead, and linseed oil to fill them.
Every winter, water from melting snows gets into the fissures and expands as it freezes, making the fissures bigger. Consequently, every autumn maintenance work is done to refill the cracks. The repairers swing out in space over a 500-foot drop and fix the monument with the same mixture that Borglum used to preserve this national monument for future generations.

It can be inferred from the passage that      

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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 modem 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 modem 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 2016-2020 acknowledges the slow progress of the reform priorities of the SEDP 2011-2015.
With agriculture still accounting for almost half the labour force, and with significantly lower labour 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.

According to the passage, what is NOT an example of “breakthrough areas”

Being aware of one's own emotions - recognizing and acknowledging feelings as they happen - is at the very heart of Emotional Intelligence. And this awareness encompasses not only moods but also thoughts about those moods. People who are able to monitor their feelings as they arise are less likely to be ruled by them and are thus better able to manage their emotions.
Managing emotions does not mean suppressing them; nor does it mean giving free rein to every feeling. Psychologist Daniel Goleman, one of several authors who have popularized the notion of Emotional Intelligence, insisted that the goal is balance and that every feeling has value and significance. As Goleman said, "A life without passion would be a dull wasteland of neutrality, cut off and isolated from the richness of life itself." Thus, we manage our emotions by expressing them in an appropriate manner. Emotions can also be managed by engaging in activities that cheer us up, soothe our hurts, or reassure us when we feel anxious.
Clearly, awareness and management of emotions are not independent. For instance, you might think that individuals who seem to experience their feelings more intensely than others would be less able to manage them. However, a critical component of awareness of emotions is the ability to assign meaning to them - to know why we are experiencing a particular feeling or mood. Psychologists have found that, among individuals who experience intense emotions, individual differences in the ability to assign meaning to those feelings predict differences in the ability to manage them. In other words, if two individuals are intensely angry, the one who is better able to understand why he or she is angry will also be better able to manage the anger.
Self-motivation refers to strong emotional self-control, which enables a person to get moving and pursue worthy goals, persist at tasks even when frustrated, and resist the temptation to act on impulse. Resisting impulsive behavior is, according to Goleman, "the root of all emotional self- control."
Of all the attributes of Emotional Intelligence, the ability to postpone immediate gratification and to persist in working toward some greater future gain is most closely related to success - whether one is trying to build a business, get a college degree, or even stay on a diet. One researcher examined whether this trait can predict a child's success in school. The study showed that 4-year-old children who can delay instant gratification in order to advance toward some future goal will be "far superior as students" when they graduate from high school than will 4-year-olds who are not able to resist the impulse to satisfy their immediate wishes.

The word "soothe" in paragraph 2 could be best replaced by ..........

Choose the word or phrase among A, B, C or D that best fits the blank space in the following passage:

"Quite apart from the economic similarity between present-day automation and the mechanization which has been proceeding for centuries, it must also be stressed that even in the United States automation is by no means the only factor (1)….. people from existing jobs.
 The increasing number of unneeded workers in (2)…. years has been the result of much more simple and old-fashioned influences: farm labourers have been (3)…. out of work by bigger tractors, miners by the cheapness of oil, and railwaymen by better roads.
 It is quite wrong, therefore, to think of automation as some new monster whose arrival (4)…. the existence of employment in the same way that the arrival of myxomatosis threatened the existence of the rabbit. Automation is one (5)….. of technological change, which itself is only one of the several changes (changes in tastes, changes in social patterns, changes in organization) which (6)…. in certain jobs disappearing and certain skills ceasing to be required. And even in America, which has a level of technology and output per (7)…. much in (8)….. of Britain’s, there is no (9)…. that the (10)….  of change is actually speeding up.
 Nevertheless changes in the amount of labour needed to produce a certain output are proceeding fairly rapidly in America - and in other countries - and my proceed more rapidly in future. Indeed it is one of the main objects of economic policy."

8. which has a level of technology and output per (7)…. much in (8)….. of Britain’s, 

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The ocean bottom - a region nearly 2.5 times greater than the total land area of Earth - is a vast frontier that even today is largely unexplored and uncharted. Until about a century ago, the deep-ocean floor was completely inaccessible, hidden beneath waters averaging over 3,600 meters deep. Totally without light and subjected to intense pressures hundreds of times greater than at the Earth's surface, the deep-ocean bottom is a hostile environment to humans, in some ways as forbidding and remote as the void of outer space.
Although researchers have taken samples of deep-ocean rocks and sediments for over a century, the first detailed global investigation of the ocean bottom did not actually start until 1968, with the beginning ofthe National Science Foundation's Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP). Using techniques first developed for the offshore oil and gas industry, the DSDP's drill ship, the Glomar Challenger, was able to maintain a steady position on the ocean's surface and drill in very deep waters, extracting samples of sediments and rock from the ocean floor.
The Glomar Challenger completed 96 voyages in a 15-year research program that ended in November 1983. During this time, the vessel logged 600,000 kilometers and took almost 20,000 core samples of seabed sediments and rocks at 624 drilling sites around the world. The Glomar Challenger's core samples have allowed geologists to reconstruct what the planet looked like hundreds of millions of years ago and to calculate what it will probably look like millions of years in the future. Today, largely on the strength of evidence gathered during the Glomar Challenger's voyages, nearly all earth scientists agree on the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift that explain many of the geological processes that shape the Earth.
The cores of sediment drilled by the Glomar Challenger have also yielded information critical to understanding the world's past climates. Deep-ocean sediments provide a climatic record stretching back hundreds of millions of years, because they are largely isolated from the mechanical erosion and the intense chemical and biological activity that rapidly destroy much land-based evidence of past climates. This record has already provided insights into the patterns and causes of past climatic change - information that may be used to predict future climates.

How long did the Glomar Challenger conduct its research?

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Geothermal energy is natural heat from the interior of the Earth that is converted to heat buildings and generate electricity. The idea of harnessing Earth’s internal heat is not new. As early as 1904 , geothermal power was used in Italy . Today, Earth’s natural internal heat is being used to generate electricity in 21 countries , including Russia, Japan, New Zealand, Iceland, Mexico, Ethiopia, Guatemala, EI Salvador, the Philippines, and the United States .Total worldwide production is approaching 9,000 MW (equivalent to nine large modern coal-burning or nuclear power plants)-double the amount in 1980 .Some 40 million people today receive their electricity from geothermal energy at a cost competitive with that of other energy sources. In EI Salvador , geothermal energy is supplying 30% of the total electric energy used.
However, at the global level, geothermal energy supplies less than 0,15%of the total energy supply.
Geothermal energy may be considered a nonrenewable energy source when rates of extraction are greater than rates of natural replenishment. However, geothermal energy has its origin in the natural heat production within Earth , and only a small fraction of the vast total resource base is being utilized today. Although most geothermal energy production involves the tapping of high heat sources, people are also using the low-temperature geothermal energy of groundwater in some applications.

Geothermal Systems
The average heat flow from the interior of the Earth is very low, about 0,06% W/m2.This amount is trivial compared with the 177 W/m2from solar heat at the surface in the United States. However, in some areas, heat flow is sufficiently high to be useful for producing energy . For the most part, areas of high heat flow are associated with plate tectonic boundaries. Oceanic ridge systems (divergent plate boundaries) and areas where mountains are being uplifted and volcanic island arcs are forming (convergent plate boundaries) are areas where this natural heat flow is anomalously high. One such region is located in the western, United States, where recent tectonic and volcanic activity has occurred.
On the basis of geological criteria, several types of hot geothermal systems (with temperatures greater than about 800C , or 1760F)have been defined, and the resource base is larger than that of fossil fuels and nuclear energy combined. A common system for energy development is hydrothermal convection, characterized by the circulation of steam and / or hot water that transfers heat from depths to the surface.

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A term 'megalopolis' (or megacity) was first used by French geographer Jean Gottman to describe the north-eastern United States in 1961. The term is used more widely now and is defined as an urban area of more than 10 million inhabitants dominated by a low-density housing. In 1995 there were 14 megacities. By 2020 there could be 30.
Megacities are the result of the process of urbanization. After cities grew into crowded urban centres, people who could afford to move into suburbs at the edge of the city. When the suburbs in turn became crowded, people moved into villages and dormitory towns outside the city, but within commuting distance. In this way, for the first time since industrialisation, the countryside began to gain population, whereas cities lost their inhabitants. In the 1980s St Louis and Detroit in the America lost between 35 and 47 per cent of their populations and London lost 15 per cent in the 20 years to 1971.
However, this movement away from cities does not mean that the city is dying. In fact it is spreading. From the old city develops a metropolitan area with many low-level urban developments. When these metropolitan areas merge together, they form megacities which contain over 10 million people. The largest of these is in America, called Boswash - a region over 300 miles long from Boston in the north to Washington, DC in the south with more than 44 million people. There are emerging megalopolises in Britain centred around London and the south-east, in Germany in the industrial region of the Ruhr and Japan in the Tokyo-Osaka-Kyoto region.

The word "spreading" in paragraph 3 is closest in meaning to     .

Choose the word or phrase ( A, B, C or D ) that best fits the blank space in the following passage.

What do you do well? What do you enjoy doing? Your answers to these two questions will help you identify your (1)_____. An employer will consider you seriously for a (2)___ when you can show them that you know who you are, what you can offer and which you have studied. Sometimes it is difficult to know what your weaknesses are. Clearly not everyone is equally good (3) ___ everything. You may need to improve yourself and so (4) ___courses in that field could turn a weakness into strength.

You will need to (5) ___some time on your self-assessment. Your honesty and the desire for self-improvement will lead to success in getting the right job. Explore the following seven areas to start to get to know yourself: your aptitude, your skills, your personality, the level of responsibility you feel comfortable with, your interests and your needs.

(5)_____

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The problem of cardiac arrest has become a major problem these days. A lot of patients have acute pain after suffering from a stroke. There are plenty of medicines, surgical methods developed in the field of medicine to treat such cardiac problems. These solutions are time consuming and costly. In the process of rehabilitation, the medicines also have a lot of side effects on the human body and take time to give relief. Therefore, a lot of people go for alternative therapies that help in rehabilitation of patients who suffer from cardiac stroke. The alternative therapies help in relieving pain, stress and make the body healthy and fit through exercise, yoga as well as meditation.
Those who have the cardiac complaint have to take a good care of their diet.
Also, they must look after their regular exercise in order to stay fit and make sure that they do not take undue stress. These are some of the precautions that you need to take while you are in the process of rehabilitation. The cardiac rehabilitation can be carried out at the rehabilitation centers as well as at the residence of the patients. Once the patient learns all the exercise and techniques of meditation and understands what diet he or she should include in their meals as the instructions of the doctor’s and dieticians, then it is possible to accomplish the rehabilitation process at home with little guidance and monitoring. But the best results are seen at the center, where the program is given to a group of patients together.
The alternative therapies used for cardiac rehabilitation are stress management, physical exercises and diet. Stress management is very much essential in the rehabilitation process because it has a lot of effects on the patient’s body. A lot of relaxation techniques are taught to the patients that helps them in stress management, among them meditation is one of the main focuses.
The various rehabilitation programs also give you information on how to have a stress free lifestyle. The patients are supported and encouraged to discuss their problems with the counselor or fellow patients. This helps them to vent their feelings and feel comforted. Breathing exercises are also of great help for the patients who are undergoing cardiac rehabilitation.
In addition to stress management, physical exercises are also given a lot of importance in the rehabilitation program. The patients are asked to perform various forms of physical exercise which are suitable to them depending on their age and the severity of their problems. These activities include activities like walking, jogging, cycling, and some other sports like badminton, tennis etc., to maintain their health and keep their muscles, bones, and body tissues in a good state. Cardio exercise in a gymnasium is also encouraged. This helps in strengthening the muscles and managing weight.
The diet of these patients also needs to be looked upon very carefully. Such people should stay away from alcohol and tobacco consumption in order to improve their health. Make sure that their meals include plenty of organic foodstuffs as well as fruits and juices. Do not include junk and oily foodstuffs in your diet because they are very difficult to digest. The intake of calories should also be done at required level. It is a significant fact that the patients have to understand and work accordingly.

What does the passage primarily discuss?

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Neil Armstrong started flying at an early age. He became interested in airplanes at the age of 2. At 15, he took flying lessons. He got a license to fly at 16. He learned how to fly before he learned how to drive a car. At university, he studied aeronautical engineering. This is the study of designing and making aircraft.
After Armstrong became an astronaut in 1962, he was trained for 4 years for the Apollo program. The Apollo mission was to put a man on the moon in ten years. On July 16, 1969, the Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Because Armstrong was the leader, he became the first man to step on the moon. He said, "This is one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." He and his fellow astronaut, Buzz Aldrin, walked on the moon for two and a half hours. They collected rocks and did some experiments.

The word “license” in paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to    .

Bees, classified into over 10,000 species, are insects found in almost every part of the world except the northernmost and southernmost regions. One commonly known species is the honeybee, the only bee that produces honey and wax. Humans use the wax in making candles, lipsticks, and other products, and they use the honey as a substance that people eat to maintain life and growth. While gathering the nectar and pollen with which they make honey, bees are simultaneously helping to fertilize the flowers on which they land. Many fruits and vegetables would not survive if bees did not carry the pollen from blossom to blossom.
Bees live in a structured environment and social structure within a hive, which is a nest with storage space for the honey. The different types of bees each perform a unique function. The worker bee carries nectar to hive in a special stomach called a honey stomach. Other workers make beeswax and shape it into a honeycomb, which is a waterproof mass of six-sided compartments, or cells. The queen lays eggs in completed cells. As the workers build more cells, the queen lays more eggs.
All workers, like the queen, are female, but the workers are smaller than the queen. The male honeybees are called drones; they do no work and cannot sting. They are developed from unfertilized eggs, and their only job is to impregnate a queen. The queen must be fertilized in order to lay more worker eggs. During the season when less honey is available and the drone is of no further use, the workers block the drones from eating the honey so that they will starve to death.

The passage implies that bees can be found in each of the following parts of the world except ..........

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Vitamins, taken in tiny doses, are a major group of organic compounds that regulate the mechanisms by which the body converts food into energy. They should not be confused with minerals, which are inorganic in their makeup. Although in general the naming of vitamins followed the alphabetical order of their identification, the nomenclature of individual substances may appear to be somewhat random and disorganized. Among the 13 vitamins known today, five are produced in the body. Because the body produces sufficient quantities of some but not all vitamins, they must be supplemented in the daily diet. Although each vitamin has its specific designation and cannot be replaced by another compound, a lack of one vitamin can interfere with the processing of another. When a lack of even one vitamin in a diet is continual, a vitamin deficiency may result.
The best way for an individual to ensure a necessary supply of vitamins is to maintain a balanced diet that includes a variety of foods and provides adequate quantities of all the compounds. Some people take vitamin supplements, predominantly in the form of tablets. The vitamins in such supplements are equivalent to those in food, but an adult who maintains a balanced diet does not need a daily supplement. The ingestion of supplements is recommended only to correct an existing deficiency due to unbalanced diet, to provide vitamins known to be lacking in a restricted diet, or to act as a therapeutic measure in medical treatment. Specifically, caution must be exercised with fat-soluble substances, such as vitamins A and D, because, taken in gigantic doses, they may present a serious health hazard over a period of time.

How many vitamins must be derived from nourishment?

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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 modem 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 modem 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 2016-2020 acknowledges the slow progress of the reform priorities of the SEDP 2011-2015.
With agriculture still accounting for almost half the labour force, and with significantly lower labour 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.

According to the passage, nearly     of the households did NOT get access to clean water in 2015.

Interest is the sum charged for borrowing money for a fixed period of time. Principal is the term used for the money that is borrowed, and the rate of interest is the percent per year of the principal charged for its use. Most of the profits for a bank are derived from the interest that they charge for the use of their own or their depositor’s money.
All problems in interest may be solved by using one general equation that may be stated as follows:
Interest = Principal X Rate X Time
Any one of the four quantities – that is, interest, principal, rate, or time – may be found when the other three are known. The time is expressed in years. The rate is expressed as a decimal fraction. Thus, 6 percent interest means six cents charged for the use of $1 of principal borrowed for one year. Although the time may be less than, equal to, or greater than one year, most applications for loans are for periods of less than one year. For purpose of computing interest for short periods, the commercial year or 360 days is commonly used, but when large sums of money are involved, exact interest is computed on the basis of 365 days.

At 4 percent interest for the use of $1 principal, how much would one pay?

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Thirty years ago, Lake Ponkapog in Hartwell, New Jersey, was full of life. Many birds and animals lived beside the water, which was full of fish. Now there are few birds, animals, and fish. The lake water is polluted. It is a dirty brown colour, and it is filled with strange plants.
How did this happen? First, we must think about how water gets into Lake Ponkapog. When it rains, water comes into the lake from all around. In the past, there were woods all around Lake Ponkapog, so  the rainwater was clean.
Now there are many homes on the lake hore. People often use the chemicals in their gardens. They use other chemicals inside their houses for cleaning and killing insects. There are also many businesses. Businesses use chemicals in their machines or stores. Other chemicals fall onto the ground from cars or trucks. When it rains, the rainwater flows by these homes and businesses. It picks up all the chemicals and then pours them into the lake. They pollute the water and kill the animal life.
There is still another problem at the lake: exotic plants. These plants come from other countries. They have no natural enemies here, and they grow very quickly. In a short time, they can fill up a lake. Then there is no room for other plants. The plants that normally grow there die. These plants gave many animals and fish their foods or their homes. So now those animals and fish die, too.
People in Hartwell are worried. They love their lake and want to save it. Will it be possible? A clean lake must have clean rainwater going into it. Clean rainwater is possible only if people are more careful about chemicals at home and at work. They must also be more careful about gas and oil and other chemicals on the ground.

The phrase “fill up” in the passage probably means     .

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“ Calcite- containing dust particles blow into the air and combine with nitric acid in polluted air from factories to form an entirely new particle – calcium nitrate , ” said Alexander Laskin, a senior research scientist at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington .These nitrates have optical and chemical properties that are completely different from those of the originally dry dust particles . Due to this, climate models need to be updated to reflect this chemistry. Calcite dust is common in arid areas such as Israel, where scientists collected particles for analysis.
Working from a mountaintop, the team collected dust that had blown in from the northern shores of Egypt, Sinai,and southern Israel. The particles had combined with air containing pollutants that came from Cairo.They analyzed nearly 2,00 individual particles and observed the physical and chemical changes at the W.R Wiley Environmental Sciences Laboratory.
A key change in the properties of the newly formed nitrate particles is that they begin to absorb water and retain the moisture .These wet particles can scatter and absorb sunlight-presenting climate modelers, who need to know where the energy is going , a new wild card to deal with . Companion studies of dust samples from the Sahara and the Saudi coast and loess from China show that the higher the calcium in the mineral , the more reactive they are in with nitric acid .And once the particle is changed , it stays that way.
“When dust storms kick up these particles and they enter polluted areas , the particles change ,” Laskin said . “To what extent this is happening globally, as more of the world becomes industrialized , we don’t know . But now we have the laboratory and field evidence that shows it is definitely happening . The story is much more complicated than anybody thought .”

Which of the following may be true ?

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On the tiny island of Flores, east of Bali and midway between Asia and Australia, the scientists have discovered the remains of a small, hobbit-like species of humans. These people grew no larger than the modern three-year-old child. They lived about 18,000 years ago and are completely different species of human.
This discovery has taught scientists a lot about the human species. This remarkable discovery shows that the human species is more varied and flexible in its ability to adapt than previously thought. These hobbit-like people join a short list of other type of humans that lived with modern humans.
The researchers believe that these hobbits evolved from a normal size, human population that reached Flores around 840,000 years ago. One likely explanation is that, over thousands of years, the species became smaller because the environmental conditions favored a smaller body size. The dwarfing of mammals on islands occurs frequently. Islands limit food supply and predators and species compete for the same environmental space. Survival would depend on minimizing energy requirements.a

We learn from the passage that dwarfing has occurred .

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:
In the late 1960’s, many people in North America turned their attention to environmental problems and new steel-and-glass skyscrapers were widely criticized. Ecologists pointed out that a cluster of tall buildings in a city often overburdens public transportation and parking lot capacities.
Skyscrapers are also lavish consumers, and waster, of electric power. In one recent year, the addition of 17 million square feet of skyscraper office space in New York City raised the peak daily demand for electricity by 120,-000 kilowatts- enough to supply the entire city of Albany, New York, for a day.
Glass-walled skyscrapers can be especially wasteful. The heat loss (or gain) through a wall of half-inch plate glass is more than ten times that through a typical masonry wall filled with insulation board. To lessen the strain on heating and air- conditioning equipment, builders of skyscrapers have begun to use double glazed panels of glass, and reflective glasses coated with silver or gold mirror films that reduce glare as well as heat gain. However, mirror-walled skyscrapers raise the temperature of the surrounding air and affect neighboring buildings.
Skyscrapers put a severe strain on a city’s sanitation facilities, too. If fully occupied, the two World Trade Center towers in New York City would alone generate 2.25 million gallons of raw sewage each year-as much as a city the size of Stamford, Connecticut, which has a population of more than 109,000.
Skyscrapers also interfere with television reception, block bird flyways, and obstruct air traffic. In Boston, in the late 1960’s some people even feared that shadows from skyscrapers would kill the grass on Boston Common.
Still, people continue to build skyscrapers for all the reasons that they have always built them – personal ambition, civic pride, and the desire of owners to have the largest possible amount of rentable space.

According to the passage, the attitude of many people in North America towards skyscrapers could be best described as