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Fifty-five delegates representing all thirteen states except Rhode Island attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia from May to September 1787. The delegates had been instructed by the Continental Congress to revise the old Articles of Confederation, but most believed that a stronger central government was needed. There were differences, however, about what structure the government should take and how much influence large states should have.
Virginia was by far the most populous state, with twice as many as people as New York, four times as many as New Jersey, and ten times as many as Delaware. The leader of the Virginia delegation, James Madison, had already drawn up a plan for government, which became known as the Large State Plan. Its essence was that congressional representation would be based on population. It provided for two or more national executives. The smaller states feared that under this plan, a few large states would lord over the rest. New Jersey countered with the Small State Plan. It provided for equal representation for all states in a national legislature and for a single national executive. Angry debate, heightened by a stifling heat wave, led to deadlock.
A cooling of tempers seemed to come with lower temperatures. The delegates hammered out an agreement known as the Great Compromise- actually a bundle of shrewd compromises. They decided that Congress would consist of two houses. The larger states were granted representation based on population in the lower house, the House of Representatives. The smaller states were given equal representation in the upper house, the Senate, in which each state would have two senators regardless of population. It was also agreed that there would be a single executive, the president. This critical compromise broke the logjam, and from then on, success seemed within reach.

The phrase “this plan” refers to

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A gesture is an action that sends a message from one person to another without using words. We use gestures to communicate with others. There are some gestures that have completely different meaning depending on when and where they are used.
When an American wants to show that something is OK. or good, he raises his hand and makes a circle with his thumb and foreigners. The circle sign has only one meaning for him. He might be surprised to learn that in other countries it can mean something different. In Japan, for instance, it is the gesture for money. In France, it means 'zero' or 'worthless'. Such differences can lead to all kinds of misunderstanding when foreigners meet. But why is it that the same gesture has so many different meanings?
When some people want to show that something is exact or precise, they make a sign to show that they are holding something between the tips of their thumb and forefinger. Many people from all over the world do this when they want to make a specific point as they are speaking. People later started using this signal to mean 'exactly right' or 'perfect'. This was how the famous OK was bom.
In Japan, money means coins and coins are around. Therefore, making a round hand sign came to represent money. It is simple as that. The French sign for 'nothing' or 'worthless' also has a simple origin. This time the circle doesn't represent a coin, but nought. Nought equals zero, zero equals nothing, nothing equals worthless.

When does an American raise his hand and make a circle sign?

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.

What do many people believe about gold?

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          Keeping the World in Our Pockets
Faster processors and advances in memory technology have made today’s smartphones much more powerful than a lot of computers from just a decade ago. With wireless technology, people can surf the Internet, play online games, send e-mail, and do (1)............ all the things they once could only do on a computer. (2)......... , they have the power to do things constantly at their fingertips.
Many people (3)....... that while smartphones are powerful tools, they are making people reliant on them. Why would a person need to learn to read a map when he can get directions to anywhere by simply asking his phone a question? Who needs to learn maths when you have immense calculating power in your pocket at all times? What (4).........is there to memorise facts about history, art, or geography when that information is readily available from a portable Internet interface?
There are just some of the questions being asked and answered as smartphone usage continues to spread. Like any technology, smartphones have their advantages, but they do have disadvantages as well that we must (5).......... an eye on.
(5)............................

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Many scientists believe our love of sugar may actually be an addiction. When we eat or drink sugary foods, the sugar enters our blood and affects parts of our brain that make us feel good. Then the good feeling goes away, leaving us wanting more. All tasty foods do this, but sugar has a particularly strong effect. In this way, it is in fact an addictive drug, one that doctors recommend we all cut down on.
"It seems like every time I study an illness and trace a path to the first cause, I find my way back to sugar," says scientist Richard Johnson. One- third of adults worldwide have high blood pressure, and up to 347 million have diabetes. Why? "Sugar, we believe, is one of the culprits, if not the major culprit," says Johnson.
Our bodies are designed to survive on very little sugar. Early humans often had very little food, so our bodies learned to be very efficient in storing sugar as fat. In this way, we had energy stored for when there was no food. But today, most people have more than enough. So the very thing that once saved us may now be killing us.
So what is the solution? It's obvious that we need to eat less sugar. The trouble is, in today's world, it's extremely difficult to avoid. From breakfast cereals to after-dinner desserts, our foods are increasingly filled with it. Some manufacturers even use sugar to replace taste in foods that are advertised as low in fat.
But there are those who are fighting back against sugar. Many schools are replacing sugary desserts with healthier options like fruit. Other schools are growing their own food in gardens, or building facilities like walking tracks so students and others in the community can exercise. The battle has not yet been lost.

Which of the following statements about sugar is NOT true?

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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.

What was Vietnam’s per capita GDP growth rate in 2015?

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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 word enhanced in paragraph 4 is closest in meaning to

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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.

What is nuclear family?

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What geologists call the Basin and Range Province in the United States roughly coincides in its northern portions with the geographic province known as the Great Basin. The Great Basin is hemmed in west by the Sierra Nevada and on the east Line by the Rocky Mountains; it has no outlet to the sea. The prevailing winds in the Great Basin are from the west. Warm, moist air from the Pacific Ocean is forced upward as it crosses the Sierra Nevada. At the higher altitudes it cools and the moisture it carries is precipitated as rain or snow on the western slopes of the mountains. That which reaches the Basin is air wrung dry of moisture. What little water falls there as rain or snow, mostly in the winter months, evaporates on the broad, flat desert floors. It is, therefore, an environment in which organisms battle for survival. Along the rare watercourses, cottonwoods and willows eke out a sparse existence. In the upland ranges, pinion pines and junipers struggle to hold their own.
But the Great Basin has not always been so arid. Many of its dry, closed depressions were once filled with water. Owens Valley, Panamint Valley, and Death Valley were once a string of interconnected lakes .The two largest of the ancient lakes of the Great Basin were Lake Lahontan and Lake Bonneville. The Great Salt Lake is all that remains of the latter, and Pyramid Lake is one of the last briny remnants of the former. There seem to have been several periods within the last tens of thousands of years when water accumulated in these basins. The rise and fall of the lakes were undoubtedly linked to the advances and retreats of the great ice sheets that covered much of the northern part of the North American continent during those times.
Climatic changes during the Ice Ages sometimes brought cooler, wetter weather to mid latitude deserts worldwide, including those of the Great Basin. The broken valleys of the Great Basin provided ready receptacles for this moisture.

Why does the author mention cottonwoods and willows?

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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.aa

When did John Smith most likely meet Pocahontas?

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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.

According to the passage, Borglum’s son _     

Quite different from storm surges are the giant sea waves called tsunamis, which derive their name from the Japanese expression for “high water in a harbor.” These waves are also referred to by the general public as tidal waves, although they have relatively little to do with tides.
Scientists often referred to them as seismic sea waves, far more appropriate in that they do result from undersea seismic activity.
Tsunamis are caused when the sea bottom suddenly moves, during an underwater earthquake or volcano for example, and the water above the moving earth is suddenly displaced. This sudden shift of water sets off a series of waves. These waves can travel great distances at speeds close to 700 kilometers per hour. In the open ocean, tsunamis have little noticeable amplitude, often no more than one or two meters. It is when they hit the shallow waters near the coast that they increase in height, possibly up to 40 meters.
Tsunamis often occur in the Pacific because the Pacific is an area of heavy seismic activity.
Two areas of the Pacific well accustomed to the threat of tsunamis are Japan and Hawaii. Because the seismic activity that causes tsunamis in Japan often occurs on the ocean bottom quite close to the islands, the tsunamis that hit Japan often come with little warning and can, therefore, prove disastrous. Most of the tsunamis that hit the Hawaiian Islands, however, originate thousands of miles away near the coast of Alaska, so these tsunamis have a much greater distance to travel and the inhabitants of Hawaii generally have time for warning of their imminent arrival.
Tsunamis are certainly not limited to Japan and Hawaii. In 1755, Europe experienced a calamitous tsunami, when movement along the fault lines near the Azores caused a massive tsunami to sweep onto the Portuguese coast and flood the heavily populated area around Lisbon. The greatest tsunami on record occurred on the other side of the world in 1883 when the Krakatoa volcano underwent a massive explosion, sending waves more than 30 meters high onto nearby Indonesian islands; the tsunami from this volcano actually traveled around the world and was witnessed as far away as the English Channel.

The possessive “their” refers to  ..............

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Satoru Iwata is not a household name, but he should be. Most people, however, would recognize his brain children, the Nintendo DS and the Wii. These two game systems completely changed the world of gaming. It’s hard to imagine gaming without them, but amazingly, the DS and Wii almost didn’t happen! It is only thanks to the innovative ideas of Iwata that we have these systems today.
Satoru Iwata was made the CEO of Nintendo in 2002. At that time, the video game market was suffering, and Nintendo was having trouble with its sales. Iwata thought that a change in strategy was  due. Previously, the strategy in the game industry was to keep making the same kinds of games and consoles but just improve their power and complexity. However, Iwata didn’t just want to attract dedicated gamers. He wanted to bring in new kinds of players to video gaming. How was he going to do that? He decided to change the very concept of video games.
Iwata wanted to make video games easier to pick up and more relevant to people’s lives. Out of this idea came the Nintendo DS. People interacted more directly with the game by using a touch screen instead of just a set of buttons. Iwata took this idea to the extreme with the motion-based Wii. Now, just by using natural body movements, players can enjoy playing all sorts of games.
The kinds of games produced changed as well. Along with the regular role-playing game (RPG), action, and sport games, new kinds of “games” were designed. Some of these new games, like Brain Age, improved thinking abilities. Others, like Wii Fit, improved fitness. This has brought in a new age of gaming. Everyone from grandparents to their grandchildren seems to be playing Nintendo products. With all that we have seen so far, we can only wonder what is next for Iwata. Surely it will be something groundbreaking.

What is the main idea of the passage?

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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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Martin Luther King, Jr., is well known for his work in civil rights and for his many famous speeches, among them is his moving “I Have A Dream” speech. But fewer people know much about King’s childhood. M.L., as he was called, was born in 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia, at the home of his maternal grandfather. M.L.’s grandfather, the Reverend A.D. Williams, purchased their home on Auburn Avenue in 1909, twenty years before M.L. was born. The Reverend Williams, an eloquent speaker, played an important role in the community since so many people’s lives centered around the church. He allowed his church and his home to be used as a meeting place for a number of organizations dedicated to the education and social advancement of blacks.
M.L. grew up in this atmosphere, with his home being used as a community gathering place, and was no doubt influenced by it.

M.L.’s childhood was not especially eventful. His father was a minister and his mother was a musician. He was the second of three children, and he attended all-black schools in a black neighborhood. The neighborhood was not poor, however. Auburn Avenue was the main artery through a prosperous neighborhood that had come to symbolize achievement for Atlanta’s black people. It was an area of banks, insurance companies, builders, jewelers, tailors, doctors, lawyers, and other black-owner, black- operated businesses, and services. Even in the face of Atlanta’s segregation, the district thrived. Dr. King never forgot the community spirit he had known as a child, nor did he forget the racial prejudice that was a seemingly insurmountable barrier that kept black Atlanta from mingling with whites.

According to the author, King was influenced by

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“They told me I could never walk again. But when I listened to music, I forgot all about the pain. I found the strength I didn’t know I had.”Ninety-two-year-old Tina Goodman, who regained her ability to walk, thanks to music.
This is just one of the many stories in Fettaro’s book “The Healing Power of Music” . Fettaro tries to show just how important music is in our lives and how it can help us to be healthy and happy.
According to Fettaro, music can make sick people again. In fact, his book comes with a CD of recordings, each one specially designed to help with a number of health problems.
Fettaro, e well-known music therapist, promises that by reading his book, you will be able to develop the healing power of music in your life. He says this will help you fight headaches and back pain, as well as reduce stress, high blood pressure, and many other common illnesses.
Certainly, I accept that listening to certain types of music can help with particular problems, such as stress. I am also comfortable with Fettaro’s claim that by reading his book, you’ll be able to create a peaceful enviroment to help you relax in your home. I found the relaxation and breathing techniques very useful. Similarly his claim that music help you sleep better seems reasonable. Yet when he goes on to promise his music therapies will help cure depression and even cancer, he begins to sound a little bit unbelievable.
Nevertheless, for those of you who are interested in the power of music to heal, this is a great book to buy. It’s a thorough introduction to the history and practice of music therapy. Fettaro writes in a simple, easy to understand way and shows clearly how music can affect us positively. His basic message-that music can improve our lives-is well-presented and clear. It may even be true that certain techniques covered here can help some people recover from unpleasant health problems. However, his promises of “amazing results” seem impossible to justify.

What is the meaning of the word “covered”?

Read the following passage and choose the best answer for each blank.

Vietnam is considered a third world country, its people live (26) _____ poverty by the millions. After the (27) _____, Vietnam's economy remained dominated by small-scale production, low labor productivity, (28) _____, material and technological shortfalls, and insufficient food and (29) _____ goods. The Doi Moi reforms that were instated in 1986 have shed new light and added new features to the Vietnamese economy. (30) ____ Vietnamese Communist Party plays a leading role in establishing the foundations and principles of communism, mapping strategies for economic development, setting growth targets, and (31) _____ reforms. Doi Moi combined government planning with free-market incentives and (32) _____ the establishment of private businesses and foreign investment, including foreign-owned enterprises. By the late 1990s, the success of the business and agricultural reforms ushered in under Doi Moi was evident. (33) _____ than 30,000 private businesses had been created, and the economy was growing at an annual (34) _____ of more than 7 percent. Farming systems research and the international development projects are a source of new hope for the people of Vietnam. If these recent projects are successful and Doi Moi continues on its current path the Vietnamese people may (35) _____ a new standard of living. More reforms like Doi Moi need to take place in order to create a more stable Vietnamese future.

(29) _____

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.

The author lists various animals to  ...............

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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

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:
Many of the world’s cities lie under a permanent blanket of smog. People are concerned about global warming, and fuel prices just keep going up and up. It’s no surprise therefore, that in recent years, car manufacturers have been put under pressure to invent a vehicle that is both cheaper to run and better for the environment. Finally, after much trial and error, it seems as though they might be making progress, and the future of the car industry is beginning to look a little “greener”.
One of the first ideas which car manufacturers tried was to replace engines which run on fossil fuels with electric motors. Unfortunately, these vehices had several drawbacks and they didn’t sell very well. The problems were that the batteries of these electric cars ran out very quickly and took a long time to recharge. Also, the replacement energy parts were very expensive.
However, the idea of electric cars has not been scrapped altogether. Car manufacturers have improved the concept so that environmentally friendly cars can now be efficient and economical as well. This is where the hybrid car, which has both an electric motor and a traditional petrol engine, comes in. The electric motor never needs to be recharged and it is much better for the planet than a traditional car.
In a hybrid car, the engine is controlled by a computer which determines whether the car runs on petrol, electricity, or both. When the car needs maximum power, for example, if it is accelerating or climbing a steep hill, it uses all of its resources, whereas at steady speeds it runs only on petrol. When slowing down or braking, the electric motor recharges its batteries.
Hybrid cars are better for the environment because the electric motor can help out whenever it is needed and they have a much smaller engine than a traditional car. Also, hybrid cars on the market are made using materials such as aluminium and carbon fibre, which makes them extremely light. Both of these factors mean that they use far less petrol than normal cars, so they produce less pollution.
Of course, hybrid cars aren’t perfect; they still run on fossil fuel and so pollute the environment to some extent. However, they may be the first step along the road to cleaner, “greener” cars. Car manufacturers are already working on vehicles which run on hydrogen. The only emission from these cars is harmless water vapor. These are still some way in the future, though, as designers need to think of cheap and safe ways of producing, transporting and storing hydrogen, but at last, it looks like we might be heading in the right direction.

The word “drawbacks” in paragraph 2 is closest in meaning to “     ”.