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

"Before the 1960s, Singapore was essential a trading nation. Since (1)….. , it has developed a more (2)…. economy and has become an important financial, trade, and transportation center. Singapore has (3)….. banks, insurance, and finance companies, as (4) …..  as a stock exchange. Tourism is also important to the (5)…. of Singapore.
 There is (6)…. unemployment in Singapore. The country’s annual income per capita (per person) is one of the (7) …. in Asia. The government of Singapore plays a major role in the country’s economy. For example, it (8)….. what benefits, such as vacation time and sick leave, must be (9)….for workers by employers. It also operates an employment agency to help people find jobs, and it provides (10)…..  for retired workers."

3. Singapore has (3)….. banks, insurance, and finance companies,

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Public holidays in the United Kingdom, commonly referred to as bank holidays, are days where most businesses and non – essential services are closed although an increasing number of retail businesses (especially the larger ones) do open on some of the public holidays. There are restrictions on trading on Sundays and Christmas Day. Four public holidays are common to all countries of the United Kingdom. These are: New Year's Day, the first Monday in May, Christmas Day, and Boxing Day. Some banks open on some bank holidays. In Scotland, while New Year's Day and Christmas Day are national holidays, other bank holidays are not necessarily public holidays, since the Scots instead observe traditional local customs and practice for their public holidays. In Northern Ireland, once again, bank holidays other than New Year's
Day and Christmas Day are not necessarily public holidays. Good Friday and Christmas Day are common law holidays, except in Scotland, where they are bank holidays. In Scotland the holiday on 1 January (or 2 January if 1 January is Sunday) is statutory, and 25 December is also a statutory holiday (or 26 December if Christmas Day falls on a Sunday). Boxing Day is a holiday traditionally celebrated  the day following Christmas Day, when servants and tradesmen would receive gifts, known as a "Christmas box", from their bosses or employers. Today, Boxing Day is the bank holiday that generally takes place on 26 December. And 28 December only is given if Boxing Day is Saturday.
Like Denmark, the United Kingdom has no national day holiday marked or celebrated for its formal founding date. Increasingly, there are calls for public holidays on the patron saints' days in England, Scotland and Wales. An online petition sent to the Prime Minister received 11,000 signatures for a public holiday in Wales on St. David's Day; the Scottish Parliament has passed a bill creating a public holiday  on St. Andrew's Day although it must be taken in place of another public holiday; campaigners in England are calling for a bank holiday on St. George's Day; and in Cornwall, there are calls for a public holiday on St. Piran's Day.

What does the word “statutory” in paragraph 1 mean?

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In the exploration of the linguistic life cycle, it is apparent that it is much more difficult to learn a second language in adulthood than a first language in childhood. Most adults never completely master foreign language, especially in phonology - hence the ubiquitous foreign accent. Their development often "fossilizes" into permanent error patterns that no teaching or correction can do. Of course, there are great individual differences, which depend on effort, attitudes, amount of exposure, quality of teaching and plain talent, but there seems to be a cap for the best adults in the best circumstances.
Many explanations have been advanced for children's superiority: they exploit Motherless (the simplified, repetitive conversation between parents and children), make errors oneself- consciously, are more motivated to communicate, like to conform, are not set in their ways, and have no first language to interfere. But some of these accounts are unlikely, based on what is known about how language acquisition works. Recent evidence is calling these social and motivation explanations into doubt. Holding every other factor constant, a key factor stands out: sheer age.
Systematic evidence comes from the psychologist Elisa Newport and her colleagues. They tested Korean and Chinese-born students at the University of Illinois who had spent at least ten years in the United States. The immigrants were given a list of 276 simple English sentences, half of them containing some grammatical errors. The immigrants who came to the United States between the ages of 3 and 7 performed identically to American bom students. Those who arrived between the ages of 8 and 15 did worse the later they arrived, and those who arrived between 17 and 39 did the worst of all, and showed huge variability unrelated to their age of arrival.

According to the first paragraph, what is TRUE about adults' learning another language?

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It is often the case with folktales that they develop from actual happenings but in their development lose much of their factual base; the story of Pocahontas quite possibly fits into this category of folktale. This princess of the Powhatan tribe was firmly established in the lore of early America and has been made even more famous by the Disney film based on the folktale that arose from her life. She was a real-life person, but the actual story of her life most probably different considerably from the folktale and the movie based on the folktale. Powhatan, the chief of a confederacy of tribes in Virginia, had several daughters, none of whom was actually named Pocahontas. The nickname means “playful one,” and several of Powhatan’s daughters were called Pocahontas. The daughter of Powhatan who became the subject of the folktale was named Matoaka. What has been verified about Matoaka, or Pocahontas as she has come to be known, is that she did marry an Englishman and that she did spend time in England before she died there at a young age. In the spring of 1613, a young Pocahontas was captured by the English and taken into Jamestown. There she was treated with courtesy as the daughter of chief Powhatan. While Pocahontas was at Jamestown, English gentlemen John Rolfe fell in love with her and asked her to marry. Both the governor of the Jamestown colony and Pocahontas’s father Powhatan approved the marriage as a means of securing peace between Powhatan’s tribe and the English at Jamestown. In 1616, Pocahontas accompanied her new husband to England, where she was royally received. Shortly before her planned return to Virginia in 1617, she contracted an illness and died rather suddenly.
A major part of the folktale of Pocahontas that is unverified concerns her love for English Captain John Smith is the period of time before her capture by the British and her rescue of him from almost certain death. Captain John Smith was indeed at the colony of Jamestown and was acquainted with Powhatan and his daughters, he even described meeting them in 1612 journal. However, the story of his rescue by the young maiden did not appear in his writing until 1624, well after Pocahontas had aroused widespread interest in England by her marriage to an English gentlemen and her visit to England. It is the discrepancy in dates that has caused some historians to doubt the veracity of the tale. However, other historians do argue quite persuasively that this incident did truly take place.

How was Pocahontas treated when she was held at Jamestown?

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Edward Patrick Francis “Eddie” Eagan (April 26, 1897-June 14, 1967), was an amateur boxing star of the early 1920s. He was born into a poor family in Denver, Colorado. His father died in a railroad accident when Eagan was only a year old. He and his four brothers were raised by his mother, who earned a small income from teaching foreign languages.
Inspired by Frank Merriwell, the hero of a series of popular novels for boys, Eagan pursued an education for himself as well as an interest in boxing. He attended the University of Denver for a year before serving in the U.S. Army as an artillery lieutenant during World War I. After the war, he entered Yale University and, while studying there, won the U.S. national amateur heavyweight boxing title. He graduated from Yale in 1921, attended Harvard Law School, and received a Rhodes scholarship to the University of Oxford where he received his Master’s Degree in 1928.
While studying at Oxford, Eagan became the first American to win the British amateur boxing championship. Eagan won his first Olympic gold medal as a light heavyweight boxer at the 1920 Olympic Games in Antwerp, Belgium. Eagan also fought at the 1924 Olympics in Paris as a heavyweight but failed to get a medal.
Though he had taken up the sport just three weeks before the competition, he managed to win a second gold medal as a member of the four-man bobsled team at the 1932 Olympics in Lake Placid, New York. Thus he became the only athlete to win gold medals at both the Summer and Winter Olympics.
Eagan was a member of the first group of athletes inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame in 1983. Eagan became a respected attorney, serving as an assistant district attorney for southern New York and as chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission (1945-51). He married soap heiress. Margaret Colgate and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel during World War II. He died at the age of 70, in Rye, New York.

According to the passage, where were the 1920 Olympic Games held?

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We live in a world of tired, sleep deprived people. In his book Counting Sheep, Paul Martin - a behavioural biologist - describes a society which is just too busy to sleep and which does not givesleeping the importance it deserves.
Modern society has invented reasons not to sleep. We are now a 24/7 society where shops and services must be available all hours. We spend longer hours at work than we used to, and more time getting to work. Mobile phones and email allow us to stay in touch round the clock and late-night TV and the Internet tempt us away from our beds. When we need more time for work or pleasure, the easy solution is to sleep less. The average adult sleeps only 6.2 hours a night during the week, whereas research shows that most people need eight or even eight and a half hours' sleep to feel at their best.
Nowadays, many people have got used to sleeping less than they need and they live in an almost permanent state of 'sleep debt'.
Until the invention of the electric light in 1879 our daily cycle of sleep used to depend on the hours of daylight. People would get up with the sun and go to bed at nightfall. But nowadays our hours of sleep are mainly determined by our working hours (or our social life) and most people are woken up artificially by an alarm clock. During the day caffeine, the world's most popular drug, helps to keep us awake. 75% of the world's population habitually consume caffeine, whichup to a point masks the symptoms of sleep deprivation.
What does a chronic lack of sleep do to us? As well as making us irritable and unhappy as humans, it also reduces our motivation and ability to work. This has serious implications for society in general.
Doctors, for example, are often chronically sleep deprived, especially when they are on 'night call', and may get less than three hours' sleep. Lack of sleep can seriously impair their mood, judgment, and ability to take decisions. Tired engineers, in the early hours of the morning, made a series of mistakes with catastrophicresults. On our roads and motorways lack of sleep kills thousands of people every year. Tests show that a tired driver can be just as dangerous as a drunken driver. However, driving when drunk is against the law but driving when exhausted isn't. As Paul Martin says, it is very ironic that we admire people who function on very little sleep instead of criticizing them for being irresponsible. Our world would be a much safer, happier place if everyone, whatever their job, slept eight hours a night.

Which of the following would the writer of the passage approve of?

The attraction of gold is as old as history. Since ancient times, gold has been the object of dreams and obsessions. Western literature is full of characters who kill for gold or hoard it, from King Midas in the ancient Greek myths, to Fagin in Dickens' Oliver Twist. These characters go to evil extremes to get or keep their gold and they get the punishment they deserve. Most people would not be willing to go to such extremes, of course, but they would not question the assumption that gold has lasting value above and beyond any local currency. Societies change over time, customs and currencies evolve, but gold remains. A wedding ring, for example, must be gold, and so should any serious gift of jewelry. In fact, giving and wearing gold is still a mark of prestige in our post-industrial society, though gold is no longer valued as it used to be thousands of years ago.
Why is gold so valuable? True, it is shiny, durable, and rare, but it is far less useful than many other minerals or metals. It is also not like stock in a company, where the value of the stock depends on the performance of the company. Gold, on the contrary, like any currency, is valuable precisely because people believe it is valuable. That is, if people were willing to accept seashells for their labor and could use them to pay for food, fuel, and other commodities, then seashells would become a valuable currency. Thus, the value of gold depends on the collective belief that gold will continue to be valuable. As long as demand for gold remains steady, the price will hold steady; if demand is high, it will continue to increase in value. But if people should someday lose faith in gold, the price of gold could fall sharply.
Another factor that has affected the price of gold has been the increasing difficulty in acquiring it. Today, most of the gold left in the grounds is in microscopic pieces mixed with rock. To get it, miners must dig up tons and tons of rock, and then spray it with chemicals to separate out the gold. For one ounce of gold - a wedding ring, for example - the mine processes about 30 tons of rock. This is already a costly operation. But there are also hidden social and environmental costs. The mining and processing of gold is ruinous to the environment and to the health of people living nearby. Most of these mines are in poor regions where the people have had little voice in whether there should be mines and how the mines should be run. The large multinational mining companies simply bought the land and opened the mines. However, as people and governments begin to realize the extent of the damage caused by the mines, the situation might change.
Indeed, if the mining companies ever have to pay the full environmental and social costs of mining gold, the price of gold is likely to climb yet higher.

Which of the following does author most probably agree with?

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Nearly 200 of the 1500 native plant species in Hawaii are at risk of going extinct in the near future because they have been (1)........  to such low numbers. Approximately 90 percent of Hawaii's plants are   found nowhere else in the world but they are (2)........ by alien invasive species such as feral goats, pigs, rodents and non-native plants.
The Hawaii Rare Plant Restoration Group is striving to (3)........ the extinction of the 182 rare  Hawaiian plants with fewer than 50 individuals remaining in the wild. Since 1990, (4).......  a result of     their "Plant Extinction Prevention Program", sixteen species have been brought into cultivation and three species have been reintroduced. Invasive weeds have been removed in key areas and fencing put up in order to protect plants in the wild.
In the future, the Hawaii Rare Plant Restoration Program aims at collecting genetic material from the remaining plants in the wild for storage as a safety net for the future. They also aim to manage wild populations and where possible reintroduce species into (5 )........ .
(2)................................

Read the passage below and choose one correct answer for each question.

Between 1945 and 1973, the economies of the industrialized nations of Western Europe, Japan, and the U. S. grew fast enough to vastly improve living standards for their residents. A similarly favorable growth was registered by some, but far from all, of the developing or industrializing nations, in particular such thriving Southeast Asian economies as Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea. After the devastation of World War II, a substantial rebuilding boom, combined with lavish flows of aid from the US, generated rapid growth in Western Europe and Japan. American multinational corporations invested heavily in the rest of the world. Perhaps the most important of all, energy was plentiful and cheap.

Poor nations need aid from the rich nations in the form of capital and of technological and organizational expertise. They also need easy access to the markets of the industrialized nations for their manufactures and raw materials. However, the political capacity of rich nations to respond to these needs depends greatly on their own success in coping with inflation and unemployment. In democratic communities, it is exceedingly difficult to generate public support for assistance to foreign countries when average wage earners are themselves under serious financial pressure. It is not easier politically to permit cheap foreign merchandise and materials to freely enter American and European markets when they are viewed as the cause of unemployment among domestic workers.

Joining the markets of the industrialized nations is the need of many poor countries.

Since the dawn of time, people have found ways to communicate with one another. Smoke signals and tribal drums were some of the earliest forms of communication. Letters, carried by birds or by humans on foot or on horseback, made it possible for people to communicate larger amounts of information between two places. The telegram and telephone set the stage for more modern means of communication. With the invention of the cellular phone, communication itself has become mobile.
For you, a cell phone is probably just a device that you and your friends use to keep in touch with family and friends, take pictures, play games, or send text message. The definition of a cell phone is more specific: it is a hand- held wireless communication device that sends and receives signals by way of small special areas called cells.
Walkie - talkies, telephones and cell phones are duplex communication devices: They make it possible for two people to talk to each other. Cell phones and walkie- talkies are different from regular phones because they can be used in many different locations. A walkie- talkie is sometimes called a half- duplex communication device because only one person can talk at a time. A cell phone is a full- duplex device because it uses both frequencies at the same time. A walkie-talkie has only one channel. A cell phone has more than a thousand channels. A walkie- talkie can transmit and receive signals across a distance of about a mile. A cell phone can transmit and receive signals over hundreds of miles. In 1973, an electronic company called Motorola hired Martin Cooper to work on wireless communication. Motorola and Bell Laboratories (now AT& T) were in a race to invent the first portable communication device.
Martin Cooper won the race and became the inventor of the cell phone. On April 3, 1973, Cooper made the first cell phone call to his opponent at AT& T while walking down the streets of New York city. People on the sidewalks gazed at cooper in amazement. Cooper's phone was called A Motorola Dyna- Tac. It weighed a whopping 2.5 pounds (as compared to today's cell phones that weigh as little as 3 or 4 ounces)
After the invention of his cell phone, Cooper began thinking of ways to make the cell phone available to the general public. After a decade, Motorola introduced the first cell phone for commercial use. The early cell phone and its service were both expensive. The cell phone itself cost about $ 3, 500. In 1977, AT & T constructed a cell phone system and tried it out in Chicago with over 2, 000 customers. In 1981, a second cellular phone system was started in the Washington,D.C and Baltimore area. It took nearly 37 years for cell phones to become available for general public use. Today, there are more than sixty million cell phone customers with cell phones producing over thirty billion dollars per years.

To whom did Cooper make his first cell phone call?

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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.

Areas merging together form     .

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Cyclones in India, hurricanes in the Caribbean - severe weather events make news headlines almost weekly. Yet even in Britain, which has comparatively few climate extremes, the country is still governed by weather. If it’s pouring with rain the British might stay indoors or go to the cinema; if it’s fine they’ll have a picnic.
Most people nervously study the weather forecast the evening before if they’ve got an important appointment the following day. Even if they have nothing planned, the weather often affects their mood.
For individuals, the worst that can usually happen if the weather catches them on the hop is that they get wet. For business, the effects are far more serious. Airlines and shipping companies need to avoid severe weather and storm-force conditions. Power companies need to make sure they can supply the demand for electricity in cold weather; farmers plan their harvests around the forecast and food manufacturers increase their production of salads and other summer foods when fine weather is promised.
So who or what do meteorologists - weather forecasters as they are more commonly known - rely on when it comes to producing a forecast? Ninety percent of the information comes from weather satellites, the first of which was launched into space nearly forty years ago and was a minor revolution in the science of forecasting. Up until then, forecasters had relied on human observers to provide details of developing weather systems. As a result, many parts of the world where there were few humans around, especially the oceans, were information-free weather areas. Today, however, satellites can watch weather patterns developing everywhere.
In the UK meteorologists have also relied on releasing four weather balloons a day from eight fixed sites. These balloons measure wind, temperature and humidity as they rise upwards to a height of about 26,000 metres.
Some commercial aircraft can also be fitted with a range of forecasting instruments although this  system has certain disadvantages. For example, it can provide a great deal of information about the weather on popular routes, such as London to New York, but little about the weather on more out-of-the way routes.
Instruments aboard ships can also supply basic weather information as well as important data on wave height. Generally, the range of these instruments is fairly limited but they can indicate which direction rain is coming from, how low the cloud is and give an idea of when the weather system will reach land.
One forecaster who has made a name for himself is a man called Piers Corbyn, who bases his forecasts on watching the Sun. Most forecasters will offer forecasts for only 10 days ahead, but Corbyn’s forecasts are for 11 months. Although most meteorologists believe that there is no scientific basis for his work, Corbyn’s forecasts are used by insurance companies who want to plan months in advance.

Corbyn’s forecasts using the Sun are considered     .

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Nearly 200 of the 1500 native plant species in Hawaii are at risk of going extinct in the near future because they have been (1)........  to such low numbers. Approximately 90 percent of Hawaii's plants are   found nowhere else in the world but they are (2)........ by alien invasive species such as feral goats, pigs, rodents and non-native plants.
The Hawaii Rare Plant Restoration Group is striving to (3)........ the extinction of the 182 rare  Hawaiian plants with fewer than 50 individuals remaining in the wild. Since 1990, (4).......  a result of     their "Plant Extinction Prevention Program", sixteen species have been brought into cultivation and three species have been reintroduced. Invasive weeds have been removed in key areas and fencing put up in order to protect plants in the wild.
In the future, the Hawaii Rare Plant Restoration Program aims at collecting genetic material from the remaining plants in the wild for storage as a safety net for the future. They also aim to manage wild populations and where possible reintroduce species into (5 )........ .
(5)................................

All mammals feed their young. Beluga whale mothers, for example, nurse their calves for some twenty months, until they are about to give birth again and their young are able to find their own food. The behavior of feeding of the young is built into the reproductive system. It is a nonselective part of parental care and the defining feature of a mammal, the most important thing that mammals-- whether marsupials, platypuses, spiny anteaters, or placental mammals -- have in common.
But not all animal parents, even those that tend their offspring to the point of hatching or birth, feed their young. Most egg-guarding fish do not, for the simple reason that their young are so much smaller than the parents and eat food that is also much smaller than the food eaten by adults. In reptiles, the crocodile mother protects her young after they have hatched and takes them down to the water, where they will find food, but she does not actually feed them. Few insects feed their young after hatching, but some make other arrangement, provisioning their cells and nests with caterpillars and spiders that they have paralyzed with their venom and stored in a state of suspended animation so that their larvae might have a supply of fresh food when they hatch.
For animals other than mammals, then, feeding is not intrinsic to parental care. Animals add it to their reproductive strategies to give them an edge in their lifelong quest for descendants. The most vulnerable moment in any animal's life is when it first finds itself completely on its own, when it must forage and fend for itself. Feeding postpones that moment until a young animal has grown to such a size that it is better able to cope. Young that are fed by their parents become nutritionally independent at a much greater fraction of their full adult size. And in the meantime those young are shielded against the vagaries of fluctuating of difficult-to-find supplies. Once a species does take the step of feeding its young, the young become totally dependent on the extra effort. If both parents are removed, the young generally do not survive.

What can be inferred from the passage about the practice of animal parents feeding their young?

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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, all of the following are mentioned as reasons for building skyscrapers EXCEPT

Choose the word which is stresses differently from the rest: hospital, inflation, policy, constantly

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Washington was the first city in history to be created solely for the purpose of governance. Following the Revolution, members of Congress had hotly debated the question of a permanent home for themselves and for those departments – the Treasury, the Patent Office and so on – which even the sketchiest of central governments would feel obliged to establish. In 1790, largely in order to put an end to congressional bickering, George Washington was charged with selecting a site for the newly designated federal district. Not much to anyone’s surprise but to the disappointment of many he chose a tract of land on the banks of the Potomac River, a few miles upstream from his beloved plantation Mount Vernon.
The District of Columbia was taken in part from Virginia and in part from Maryland. At the time it was laid out, its hundred square miles consisted of gently rolling hills, some under cultivation and the rest heavily wooded, with a number of creeks and much swampy land along the Potomac. There is now a section of Washington that is commonly referred to as Foggy Bottom; that section bore the same nickname a hundred and eighty years ago.
Two ports cities, Alexandria and Georgetown, flourished within sight of the new capital and gave it access by ship to the most important cities of the infant nation – Charleston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Newport, Salem and Portsmouth – and also to the far-off ports of England and the Continent.

The author implies that Georgetown was important in the eighteen century because it

The initial contact between American Indians and European settlers usually involved trade, whereby Indians acquired tools and firearms and the Europeans obtained furs. These initial events usually pitted Indian tribes against each other as they competed for the European trade and for the lands containing fur-producing animals. When the furs had been depleted, the Europeans began a campaign to obtain the lands the Indians occupied. The Indians often formed confederations and alliances to fight back the Europeans; however, the Indians’ involvement in the white people’s wars usually disrupted these confederations. Indians resisted the attempts by the whites to displace them. They fought defensive wars such as the Black Hawk War in 1832. Indian uprisings also occurred, like the Sioux uprising in the 1860s.
Despite the resistance of the Indians, the Europeans were destined to win the conflict. After Indian resistance was crushed, the whites legitimized the taking of Indian lands by proposing treaties, frequently offering gifts to Indian chiefs to get them sign the treaties. Once an Indian group had signed a treaty, the whites proceeded to remove them from their land. Often the Indians were forced west of the Mississippi into Indian Territory-land the whites considered uninhabitable. If only a few Indians remained after the conquest, they were often absorbed by local tribes or forced onto reservations.
No aspect of American history is more poignant than the accounts of the forced removal of Indians across the continent. As white settlers migrated farther west, Indians were forced to sign new treaties giving up the lands earlier treaties had promised them. Some Indian tribes, realizing the futility of resistance, accepted their fate and moved westward without force. The Winnebagos, who offered little resistance, were shifted from place to place between 1829 and 1866. About half of them perished during their perpetual sojourn. Other tribes, however, bitterly resisted. The Seminoles signed a treaty in 1832 but violently resisted removal. Hostilities broke out in 1835 and continued for seven years. The United States government lost nearly 1,500 men and spent over $50 million in its attempts to crush Seminole resistance. Most of Seminoles were eventually forced to Indian Territory. However, several hundred remained in the Florida Everglades, where their descendants live today.

According to the passage, which of the following did NOT happen?

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The pain of a migraine headache can virtually disable a person who suffers from it. Millions and millions of people suffer from migraines, although many of them do not even recognize that a migraine is different from a regular headache. A migraine is not at all the same as a normal headache, and it seems to have a very physical cause.
One symptom of a migraine is a precursor, which is a visual aura before an attack. Yet only about a third of patients actually experience that, and it is therefore not a requirement in the diagnosis. Other symptoms include increased pain when a person moves, nausea, and sensitivity to light and sound. Scientists now believe that migraines are caused, not by abnormal blood vessels as previously believed, but instead by a unique electrical disorder of brain cells. Physicians used to treat migraines with medicine to constrict blood vessels because of the belief that dilated blood vessels were the cause.
The new research has been enhanced by imaging devices that allow scientists to watch patients' brains during an attack. The results show that sufferers have abnormally excitable neurons, or brain nerve cells. Prior to the attack, the neurons suddenly fire off electrical pulses at the back of the brain, which ripple like waves on a lake after a stone hits the water. They ripple across the top and then the back of the brain, ultimately affecting the brain stem where the pain centers are located. The pain then generates possibly from the brain stem itself or from blood vessels inflamed by the rapidly changing blood flow, or perhaps from both.
Scientists have experimented by applying a powerful magnet to stimulate the neurons and discovered that some people's brains react differently than others'. When stimulation was applied to the brains of people who had suffered migraines, they saw the initial aura, and some actually suffered migraines. When the same stimulation was applied to the brains of people who had never suffered migraines, they realized no effect and the neurons showed no change.
Scientists and doctors continue to work on the research in an attempt to find the perfect treatment. It is considered important to treat migraines because it is believed that prolonged untreated attacks could cause physical changes in the brain leading to chronic pain.

The new research indicates that the neurons in the brain of migraine sufferers

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 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 different 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 third, about 20 percent of the total number of American households are single people, usually women over sixty-five years of age. 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.

Who generally constitutes a one-person household?

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:
You might be surprised to know that bicycles have existed for less than two hundred years. Though the earliest comes from a sketch said to be from 1534 and attributed to Gian Giacomo, there are several early but unverified claims for the invention of the modem bicycle. No one is sure who invented this popular two- wheeled machine, but it was probably either the German Karl von Drais, in 1817, or the American W K Clarkson, in 1819. The early models didn't look much like the bicycles of today. The front wheel was much bigger than the back one, and also there weren't any pedals - riders had to move themselves forward by pushing their feet against the ground. Pedals finally arrived in the 1840s, and in 1879 an Englishman named Henry Lawson had the idea of connecting them to the back wheel with a chain. Gears, which made things much easier for those cycling uphill, first appeared in the 1890s.
There are now approximately one billion bicycles in the world - more than twice the total number of cars - and they are the main form of transport in some developing countries. They have to compete with cars on the streets of all the world’s cities, and the two forms of transport don't always mix well. In London in 2005, for example, over 300 cyclists were either killed or seriously injured in accidents involving cars. Even though bicycles are much more environmentally friendly than cars, most governments don't do much to encourage people to ride rather than drive. In China, which is famous for having a huge number of bicycles (about 200 million), the authorities in the city of Shanghai even banned cycling for a while in 2003.
Cycling is on the rise is the United Kingdom, and the number of annual journeys made by bike in London has increased 50% over the last five years. Experts say there is a mixture of reasons for this boom: concerns about the environment, the desire to keep fit, and also the fact that cycling is often not only cheaper but also quicker than travelling by car.
However, although one in three British adults owns a bicycle, they still don't use them nearly as much as they could. Bikes are used for a mere 2% of journeys in the UK, while the figure for the Netherlands is an impressive 27%.
Cycling is becoming more popular as a competitive sport, and the most famous race is of course the three-week Tour de France, which takes place every July. American Lance Armstrong won it every year from 1999 to 2005 - one of the greatest individual sporting achievements of all time.

The highlighted word “it” in paragraph 6 refers to     .