Choose the word or phrase that best fits each blank in the following passage. (1.5 pts)

On a yearly (1)______, the USA is afflicted by hurricanes on the east coast, flooding in the Midwest, forest fires, earthquakes, and any number of tornadoes, blizzards, and storms. Historically, the weather has (2)_________ as harsh a chord in people’s lives as any we feel today. Historians list the four major events to wreak devastation (3)________ the country as the Chicago fire in 1871, the Johnstown flood and the Galveston hurricane of 1900, and the San Francisco earthquake in 1906. These (4)_______ provide a flavor of the havoc that natures storms have wrecked on humanity and our reactions to them. Galveston, Texas, (5) _______ on the island of Galveston in the Gulf of New Mexico, (6)_________ on industry and exports. It's over 30,000 citizens in the early 1900s were generally economically successful and comfortable with existing conditions. (7)___________ the ill-fated morning of Sept. 7, 1900, the people of Galveston enjoyed their life on the remote island. (8)______ weather watchers had been following a (9)_______ storm* in the Atlantic for several days and were warning of the (10)_____________ danger of a hurricane. Unfortunately, people (11)_________ the warnings. A day after the hurricane had hit the island, all that (12)____________ of the beautiful city was, a mass of crumbled buildings, debris, and hopeless survivors (13)___________ aimlessly with the stench of rotting flesh all around. However, a few days later, that the city was beginning to heal became (14) ______________  everywhere – soon new buildings were (15) _______ the burned, and the lifeblood of the ravaged city was returning.

10___________

Choose the word or phrase (a, b, c or d) that best fits the blank space in the following passage.

One of the greatest advances in modern technology has been the (61)__________ of computers. They are already (62)______ used in industry and in universities and the time may come when it will be common for (63)________ people to use them as well. Computers are capable of doing extremely complicated work in all (64)_________ of learning. They can (65)______ the most complex mathematical problem and put thousands of unrelated facts (66)______ order. Because they work accurately and at high speeds they (67)______ research workers years of hard work. (68)____ is a mistake to believe that these machines could “think”. There is no (69)_____ that human beings will be controlled by machines. Though computers are capable of (70)______ from their mistakes and improving on their performance, they need detailed (71)_______ from human beings in order to be able to operate. They can never, as it were, (72)________ independent lives or rule the world by making decisions of their (73)___________. Computers are the most efficient (74)____ man has ever had and there is no limit to the ways they can be used to (75)_____ our lives.

62__________

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D to indicate the correct word or phrase that best fits each of the numbered blanks.

At 16, Paul decided he was (23)____ for full-time work, and left school. At first, his parents did not agree with him and wanted him to stay (24)____ his studies. In fact, they were very angry with him. “We’re worried (25)____ your future!” his father told him. “How can you ever get a good job (26)____ you leave school and sit in the café, drinking coffee with your friends? His parents strongly (27)____ of Paul’s friends.

27_____________

Read the passage below carefully and choose the correct answer a, b, c, or d.

ENGLISH SPELLING

English was first written down in the 6th century. At that time, writers had to use the twenty-three letters of the Latin alphabet to write down what they heard. Because English has sounds that do not exist in Latin, they added letters to represent the forty-four sounds of English. This resulted in some irregular spelling. After the Norman invasion of England in 1066, French became the language spoken by the king and other people in positions of power and influence. Many French words were introduced and the spelling of many English words changed to follow French patterns. The result was a rich and irregular mix of spelling.

The printing press was invented in the 15th century. Many early printers of English texts spoke other first languages, especially Dutch. They often paid little attention to how English words were spelled. Sometimes technical decisions were made to give columns of print straight edges. To do this, letters were taken off the ends of words and sometimes added to words. With time, people became used to seeing words spelled in the same way. Fixed spellings were therefore created by printers’ decisions. Spoken English, however, was not fixed. It continued to change, as it still does. It is no wonder that English spelling seems irregular. Words such as although, though, and cough, for example, all have the same spelling at the end but are pronounced differently. Words such as feet, meat, and seize, on the other hand, are spelled differently but have the same sound in the middle.

According to the passage, which of the following did not influence English spelling?

Choose the best answer: 
Vietnam Museum of Ethnology in Hanoi offers an insight into the 54 different (1)_________ groups of Vietnam in an effort to preserve cultural heritage and promotesocio-cultural (2)________ within the country.

The museum has over 15,000 artefacts (3)________ photographs and othermulti-media such as audiotapes. Its indoor exhibition space can be (4)________ viaa virtual tour (5)________ includes the Viet, Muong, Tho, Chut, Tay, Thai, Ka Dai,H’Mong-Dao, Tang, San Dui, Ngai, Mon-Khmer, Nam-Dao, Cham, Hoa and Khmerethnic groups. There are priceless antiques on (6)________ alongside everydayobjects such as pipes, baskets and knives.

The outdoor area presents a range of traditional (7)______ including a laystilt house and a Viet house. The museum is suitable for children, and all documents and display signs (8)______ have been translated into French and English.

New York City is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, and with good reason. NYC is the mecca of business in the United States, and as a melting pot of American culture, there is something for every style, taste and budget in New York City. With so much to see and do in NYC, it's important for NYC tourists to do their research ahead of time before their vacation in New York City.

New York is America’s safest large city, but visitors should still use common sense to protect themselves and their property. Be aware of your surroundings, and make sure to always use licensed, reputable businesses for any services you need. For example, don’t hail livery cabs (as opposed to taxis) at the airport, and don’t rent bikes from companies that seem suspicious. If you’re not sure where to find legitimate businesses, the listings at nycgo.com are a good place to start, as are those published by the Better Business Bureau. Your hotel concierge should be able to answer questions on this topic and will be helpful if you need more information about neighborhoods in the five boroughs. Another useful resource is 311, the City’s official government services and information hotline.

NYC is the mecca of business in the United States.

Read the passage and choose the correct answer to each question.

There is growing evidence that urbanization has a sharp impact on climate, causing changes that can wreak havoc on precipitation patterns that supply the precious resource of water. The heavy amounts of heat and pollution rising from cities both delay and stimulate the fall of precipitation, depriving some areas of rain while drenching others.

Cities are on average one to ten degrees warmer than the surrounding undeveloped areas. Cities also produce large amounts of pollutants called aerosols, gaseous suspensions of dust particles, or byproducts from the burning of fossil fuels. Both heat and pollutants change the dynamics of clouds. When hoisted up in the sky, the microscopic particles act as multiple surfaces on which the moisture in clouds can condense as tiny droplets. This can prevent or delay the formation of larger raindrops that fall more easily from the sky, or it can cause the rain to fall in another location.

In California, pollution blows eastward and causes a precipitation shortage of around one trillion gallons a year across the Sierra Nevada mountain range. By contrast, in very humid cities, such as Houston, heat and pollutants seem to invigorate summer storm activity by allowing clouds to build higher and fuller before releasing torrential rains.

What does the phrase “wreak havoc on” in paragraph 1 probably mean?

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

Unlike life in the countryside which is often considered to be simple and traditional, life in the city is modern and complicated.  People, from different regions, move to the cities in secretaries of having a better life for themselves and their children.  The inhabitants in the city work as office secretaries, merchants, teachers, government workers, factory workers, and even street vendors or construction workers.

The high cost of living requires city-dwellers, especially someone with low income to work harder or to take a part-time job.  For some people, every day starts as usual by getting up in the early morning to do exercise in public parks, preparing for a full day of working and studying, then immersing in crowed boulevards or narrow streets filled with motor scooters and returning home after a busy day.  They usually live in large houses, great mansions, and high-rise apartment blocks or even in a small rental equipped with modern amenities like the internet, telephone, television, satellite communication facilities, and so on.  Industrialization and modernization as well as global integration have a big impact on lifestyle in the cities.  The most noticeable impact is the Western style of clothes.  The “Ao Dai”- Vietnamese traditional clothes are no longer regularly worn in Vietnamese women's daily life.  Instead, jeans, T-shirts, and fashionable clothes are widely preferred.

The most important reason why people move to the city is that __________.

Read the passage and choose the best answers to the questions that follow, (1 pts)

Television’s contribution to family life in the United States has been an equivocal one. For while it has, indeed, kept the members of the family from dispersing, it has not served to bring them together. By dominating the time families spend together, it destroys the special quality that distinguishes one family from another, a quality that depends to a great extent on what a family does, what special rituals, games, recurrent jokes, familiar songs, and shared activities it accumulates.

“Like the sorcerer of old,” writes Urie Bronfenbrenner, “the television set casts its magic spell, freezing speech and action, turning the living into silent statues so long as the enchantment lasts. The primary danger of the television screen lies not so much in the behavior it produces – although there is danger there – as in the behavior it prevents: the talks, games, the family festivities, and arguments through which much of the child’s learning takes place and through which character is formed. Turning on the television set can turn off the process that transforms children into people.”

Of course, families today still do special things together at times: go camping in the summer, go to the zoo on a nice Sunday, take various trips and expeditions. But the ordinary daily life together is diminished – that sitting around at the dinner table, that spontaneous taking up of activity, those little games invented by children on the spur of the moment when there is nothing else to do, the scribbling, the chatting, the quarreling, all the things that form the fabric of a family, that define childhood.

Instead, the children have their regular schedule of television programs and bedtime, and the parents have their peaceful dinner together. But surely the needs of adults are being better met than the needs of children, who are effectively shunted away and rendered untroublesome.

If the family does not accumulate its backlog of shared experiences, shared everyday experiences that occur and recur and change and develop, then it is not likely to survive as anything other than a caretaking institution.

The word it in the last paragraph refers to____________ .

Choose the best answer from A, B, C, or D to complete the text.
       John lay in the hospital bed and looked around. (31)……….beds in the ward, and each one had a patient in it. He wondered if the other patients had broken their legs (32)………, or whether they were suffering from something (33) ……. The man in the next bed smiled at John.
‘‘What are you in for?” he asked.
‘‘Broken leg”, said John. ‘‘ (34) ………………….”
‘‘ Same thing. Everybody here has a broken leg except for Fred over there”
‘‘What’s wrong with Fred?” John asked curiously. He looked across at Fred, and realized (35)…… Fred was completely wrapped in bandages with only his nose showing!
33_______

Choose the best answer from A, B, C, or D to complete the following dialogue.
Jane:  Look. (31)………….  rain.
Mark: I’m not sure about that, but the sun (32)…………behind those black clouds. 
Jane:  And (33)…………..windy, too.
Mark: Yes, but I (34)………. the weather (35) ……….. too much. 
Jane:  (36)…………. the forecast?
Mark: They say(37) ……….. fine for the next few days.
Jane:  Oh, (38)…………usually wrong. I (39)……….. we can go sightseeing now.
Mark: Oh, let’s go. It (40) ……… so far this week.
Jane:  All right, but (41)…………. my raincoat and umbrella with me.
Mark: I think (42)……….. about nothing.

34.___________

Choose the best answer: 
Many human activities over the last 200 years have been responsible (1)................polluting the air and damaging people’s health. Automobile engines and power plants burn combustible (2)............ like gasoline and coal and allow toxic gases and smoke to escape into the air. Some pollutants destroy the ozone layer, which is the thin blanket of gases that (3)............ Earth from the Sun’s dangerous ultraviolet rays. Other pollutants contribute to (4)..........hardlywarming by adding to the planet’s natural greenhouse effect. Still others create acid rain, a phenomenon that has disastrous (5)..........on lake and forest habitats. Air pollution is not limited to industrial areas. Depending on the direction of the wind and its force, air pollutants may (6)............spread to other countries very far from the source of the pollution. Big cities like Los Angeles and Mexico City are*often covered by smog, a fog that occurs (7).............. air pollution. In 1952, the City of London, England, was enveloped by smog so thick that people on the streets had to feel their way around by (8)............the walls of buildings! 
7.

Read the passage and choose the correct answer to each of the questions. 

British teenagers sit up to 70 exams and tests before they reach their GCSEs (The General Certificate of Secondary Education). But there are ways to ease the stress at exam time.

What a student eats and drinks in the run-up to exams can influence how clearly they think and how happy they feel. A balanced diet with lots of fruit and vegetables, fish and complex carbohydrates will help them concentrate and think clearly. Too much high-fat, high-sugar and high-caffeine food and drink can make studying harder.

Sleeping well and for long enough to feel rested, around six to eight hours for most people, will help thinking and concentration. Students should allow half an hour or so to wind down between studying, watching TV or using a computer and going to bed to help them get a good night’s sleep. Regular exercise also helps them sleep better. Cramming all night before an exam is usually a bad idea.

Parents should be flexible around exam time. When a child is revising all day, don’t worry about household jobs that are left undone or untidy bedrooms. If they’re a bit moody they should stay calm. They can help a child to revise by making sure they have somewhere comfortable to study.

Students should remind themselves that feeling nervous is normal. Nervousness is a typical reaction to exams. All students will feel it. The key is to put these nerves to positive use. Being reminded of what they do know and the time they have put into a study can help them feel confident that they can reach their potential.

Which of the following is NOT true, according to the passage?

Read the passage and choose the correct answer to each of the questions. 

British teenagers sit up to 70 exams and tests before they reach their GCSEs (The General Certificate of Secondary Education). But there are ways to ease the stress at exam time.

What a student eats and drinks in the run-up to exams can influence how clearly they think and how happy they feel. A balanced diet with lots of fruit and vegetables, fish and complex carbohydrates will help them concentrate and think clearly. Too much high-fat, high-sugar and high-caffeine food and drink can make studying harder.

Sleeping well and for long enough to feel rested, around six to eight hours for most people, will help thinking and concentration. Students should allow half an hour or so to wind down between studying, watching TV or using a computer and going to bed to help them get a good night’s sleep. Regular exercise also helps them sleep better. Cramming all night before an exam is usually a bad idea.

Parents should be flexible around exam time. When a child is revising all day, don’t worry about household jobs that are left undone or untidy bedrooms. If they’re a bit moody they should stay calm. They can help a child to revise by making sure they have somewhere comfortable to study.

Students should remind themselves that feeling nervous is normal. Nervousness is a typical reaction to exams. All students will feel it. The key is to put these nerves to positive use. Being reminded of what they do know and the time they have put into a study can help them feel confident that they can reach their potential.

The underlined word “Cramming” in the passage probably means ____.

Read the passage and choose the correct answer:

A computer is an electronic device capable of manipulating number and symbols, first taking input, processing it, storing and giving out output under a control of set instructions which is known as a program. A general purpose computer requires the following hardware components: memory, storage device (hard disk drive), input device (keyboard, mouse etc.), output device (screen, printer etc.) and central processing unit (CPU). Many other components are involved in addition to the listed components to work together efficiently.

The CPU is can be expanded into three main parts: The ALU (Arithmetic and Logic Unit), The Bus interface Unit, and The Control Bus. The clock is an electronic circuit that gives regular pulses to the CPU. Faster clock speeds mean more pulses to the CPU and the instructions are stepped through faster. The memory chip contains millions of separate memory stores and each of these locations has a unique number. This is known as memory address. The CPU stores data at any of these addresses and fetch the content back when required.

RAM stands for Random Access Memory. These chips store the instructions for running the operating system and any computer application. This memory also stores all the data that is being worked on. RAM is a volatile memory which means that it only stores data while the computer remains switched on. When switched off, it loses all the stored data. ROM (Read Only Memory) on the other hand is a chip with program instructions permanently burned into it. The content is not lost even if the machine is switched off.

The central processing unit is a software

And while physical injury may pose the most obvious danger, the emotional and psychological consequences of domestic abuse are also severe. Emotionally abusive relationships can destroy your self-worth, __________ (15) to anxiety and depression, and make you feel helpless and alone. No one should have to endure this kind of pain—and your first step to breaking free is recognizing that your relationship is abusive.

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D to indicate the correct word or phrase that best fits each of the numbered blanks.

Living in a city has a number of drawbacks. Firstly, there is the problem of traffic (23)________ and traffic accidents. The increase in population and the increasing number of vehicles have (24)_________ many accidents to happen every day. Secondly, air pollution (25) __________ affects people’s health, and it also has a bad (26)__________ on the environment More and more city dwellers suffer from coughing or breathing problems. Thirdly, the city is noisy, even at night. Noise pollution comes from the traffic and from construction sites. Buildings are always being knocked down and rebuilt. These factors contribute to making city life (27)________ difficult for its residents.

24.____________

The bottom line is that abusive behavior is never __________ (13), whether from a man, woman, teenager, or an older adult. You deserve to feel valued, respected, and safe.

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

Reasons why I would buy an iWatch

As a principal and a teacher, my days are incredibly busy. I often don’t have the time to check messages (1) _______ my phone or computer during the day because there is rarely a free moment during my workday. This has often (2) _______ to my missing important email messages, phone calls, or text messages from my family members or schoolchildren’s parents.

I too often (3) _______ to feel the buzzing of my phone in my (4) _______ , or if I am incredibly busy, I am not able to pull it out to look at the reason for the alert. I would love the ability to have alerts right on my (5) _______ to glance at really quickly. This would help me, even during the busiest parts of the day, to quickly know (6) _______ there is an important message or phone call that I need to attend to.

One of my least favorite parts of the day is sorting through my email box at the end of a busy school day of all the messages that backed up during my day of eaching. How (7) _______ would it be to be able to (8) ______ email and other messages with a quick flick of a button on the iWatch as they arrive during the day? I imagine the iWatch buzzing with an incoming email and then offering buttons to quickly archive, delete, or send the message to a specific (9) _______. Being able to (10) _______ incoming messages as they arrive in split seconds throughout the day would save me from having to spend the time sorting through all alerts and messages at the end of the day.

(8) __________

Read the passage carefully and choose a suitale word to fill each blank

Camping holidays are always (1) ______ with students and young people-they are a cheap and (2) ______ way to see a country. People often travel by train, by coach or (3) ______ foot, so one thing is important (4) ______ before starting: you can only take with you what you can carry – usually in a backpack on your back.

If you travel with a friend, of course some items can be shared – a tent, a gas stove, food. Other things must (5) ______ by each person – clothes, footwear, a sleeping bag.

(2) _________

Choose the best answer from A, B, C, or D to complete the following dialogue.
Jane:  Look. (31)………….  rain.
Mark: I’m not sure about that, but the sun (32)…………behind those black clouds. 
Jane:  And (33)…………..windy, too.
Mark: Yes, but I (34)………. the weather (35) ……….. too much. 
Jane:  (36)…………. the forecast?
Mark: They say(37) ……….. fine for the next few days.
Jane:  Oh, (38)…………usually wrong. I (39)……….. we can go sightseeing now.
Mark: Oh, let’s go. It (40) ……… so far this week.
Jane:  All right, but (41)…………. my raincoat and umbrella with me.
Mark: I think (42)……….. about nothing.

39_________