When I was a child, as we were having dinner, my grandmother always used to say, “ _____ ”.

(374)______

Choose the best answer:
Australia is …………… hotter than Ireland.

DAKAR (August 4) – Nentique Laboratories, Inc., announced today the development of a new variety of organic wheat that ---143--- heat. Dozens of plants were cross-pollinated over many years to produce this variety, known as GR-712. It joins a growing list of ---144--- that can withstand high temperatures during extended dry periods. "Some farmers in regions close to the equator focus---145--- on rice production because rice grows well in hot climates. But in the Sahara, it is too dry for much of the year," explains company spokesman Ahmad Niang. "But for a small investment in GR-712 seeds, farmers will now be able  to  grow  wheat  in  our  region."  146---.  This added income can, in turn, be reinvested in better machinery, which will encourage more environmentally friendly farming practices.

144.......................

Choose the best answer:
We will travel from Spain to France by plane. The plane will_____at 10 am and will land at 11:00 am in Paris.

Read the reading below carefully, and then complete it with the best option A, B, C or D given below:

These features were discovered and explored (1) _______ in the late 1940s. The Lomonosov Ridge, the major ridge, cuts the Arctic Basin (2) _______ in half, extending as a submarine bridge 1,800 km (1,100 mi) (3) _______ Siberia to the northwestern tip of Greenland. Parallel (4) _______ it are two shorter ridges: the Alpha Ridge on the North American (5) _______, defining the Canada and Makarov basins, (6) _______ the Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge on the Eurasian side, (7) _______ the Nansen and Amundsen basins. The average (8) _______ of the Arctic Ocean is only 1,300 m (4,300 ft) (9) _______ the vast shallow expanses on the continental shelves. The deepest (10) _______ in the Arctic Ocean is 5,450 m (17,880 ft).

Read the following passage and choose the best answer (A, B, C, D):
Chess, often (1)______ to as the Royal Game, is the oldest of all board games which do not contain an element of chance. The origins of chess are uncertain, (2)______ there are a number of legends regarding its invention. One story says that it was King Solomon who invented chess, another that it was the Greek god Hermes, and yet another that the Chinese mandarin Han-Sing was responsible for its creation. In fact, chess almost certainly originated in India in the sixth or seventh century AD. The game’s popularity then spread quickly through Persia (now known as Iran) and from there came to Europe. The first documented reference to chess in literature is in a Persian romance which was written about 600 AD. It is (3)_______ the word ‘chess’ comes from ‘shah’, the Persian word for ‘king’ and that ‘checkmate’, the game’s winning (4)_______, comes from the phrase ‘shah mat’, (5)______ ‘the king is dead’. The rules and pieces used in the game have undergone changes over the centuries. Modem chess owes much to the Spaniard Lopez de Segura, who in 1561 wrote the first book on how to play the game. In it, he introduced the concept of ‘castling’, which had not been part of the game until then.

Read the following passage and choose the best answer (A, B, C, D):
Until recently, most American entrepreneurs were men. Discrimination against women in business, the demands of caring for families, and lack of business training had kept the number of women entrepreneurs small. Now, however, businesses owned by women account for more than $40 billion in annual revenues, and this figure is likely to continue rising throughout the 1990s. As Carolyn Doppelt Gray, an official of the Small Business Administration, has noted, "The 1970s was the decade of women entering management, and the 1980s turned out to be the decade of the woman entrepreneur". What are some of the factors behind this trend? For one thing, as more women earn advanced degrees in business and enter the corporate world, they are finding obstacles. Women are still excluded from most executive suites. Charlotte Taylor, a management consultant, has noted, "In the 1970s, women believed if they got an MBA and worked hard they could become chairman of the board. Now they've found out that isn't going to happen, so they go out on their own." In the past, most women entrepreneurs worked in "women's" fields: cosmetics and clothing, for example. But this is changing. Consider ASK Computer Systems, a $22-million- a-year computer software business. It was founded in 1973 by Sandra Kurtzig, who was then a housewife with degrees in math and engineering. When Kurtzig founded the business, her first product was software that let weekly newspapers keep tabs on their newspaper carriers and her office was a bedroom at home, with a shoebox under the bed to hold the company's cash. After she succeeded with the newspaper software system, she hired several bright computer-science graduates to develop additional programs. When these were marketed and sold, ASK began to grow. It now has 200 employees, and Sandra Kurtzig owns $66.9 million of stock. Of course, many women who start their own business fail, just as men often do. They still face hurdles in the business world, especially problems in raising money, the banking and finance world is still dominated by men, and old attitudes die hard. Most businesses owned by women are still quite small. But the situation is challenge, there are likely to be many more Sandra Kurtzigs in the years ahead.
10. The author's attitude about the future of women in business is: 

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.

William Sydney Porter (1862-1910), who wrote under the pseudonym of O. Henry, was born in North Carolina. His only formal education was to attend his Aunt Lina’s school until the age of fifteen, where he developed his lifelong love of books. By 1881 he was a licensed pharmacist. However, within a year, on the recommendation of a medical colleague of his Father’s, Porter moved to La Salle County in Texas for two years herding sheep. During this time, Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary was his constant companion, and Porter gained a knowledge of ranch life that he later incorporated into many of his short stories. He then moved to Austin for three years, and during this time the first recorded use of his pseudonym appeared, allegedly derived from his habit of calling “Oh, Henry” to a family cat. In 1887, Porter married Athol Estes. He worked as a draftsman, then as a bank teller for the First National Bank.

In 1894 Porter founded his own humor weekly, the “Rolling Stone”, a venture that failed within a year, and later wrote a column for the Houston Daily Post. In the meantime, the First National Bank was examined, and the subsequent indictment of 1886 stated that Porter had embezzled funds. Porter then fled to New Orleans, and later to Honduras, leaving his wife and child in Austin. He returned in 1897 because of his wife’s continued ill-health, however she died six months later. Then, in 1898 Porter was found guilty and sentenced to five years imprisonment in Ohio. At the age of thirty five, he entered prison as a defeated man; he had lost his job, his home, his wife, and finally his freedom. He emerged from prison three years later, reborn as O. Henry, the pseudonym he now used to hide his true identity. He wrote at least twelve stories in jail, and after re-gaining his freedom, went to New York City, where he published more than 300 stories and gained fame as America’s favorite short Story writer. Porter married again in 1907, but after months of poor health, he died in New York City at the age of forty-eight in 1910. O. Henry’s stories have been translated all over the world.

According to the passage, Porter’s Father was ___________.

Choose the best answer:
City/ children/ have/ more/ interesting life/ country ones.

Read the passage below carefully, and then choose the best answer:
What Do You Think?
We have all had bad experiences with restaurants, stores, or hotels. Maybe you have gone to a restaurant that served terrible food. Perhaps you have gone to a store that had high prices or bad service. Or maybe you have booked a hotel and found out later that the room was nothing like the advertisement. These days, we have a better chance of preventing these unpleasant surprises. We can do this by using apps. “App” is short for “application”. An app is a computer programme on a smartphone. You can use apps to do almost anything. Apps can help you play games, get directions, talk to friends, and so on. If you want to find information about a store or a hotel, you can use a review app. Review apps help us evaluate services and products before we hand over our money. The idea is very simple. After you go to a restaurant or stay in a hotel, you can post a review with one of your apps. You can say anything you want. If you like a hotel you stayed in, you can tell people that it was wonderful. If you think that the food in a certain restaurant was bad, then you tell people not to eat there. Other people can use their apps to read your reviews. Plenty of people prefer not to use these review apps. Many of these people prefer to go out and decide for themselves whether or not a service is good. However, review apps are getting more and more popular every day. Some apps are for specific services. For example, Tripadvisor focuses on travel, and Goodreads focuses on books. There are also other, larger apps that provide information for just about every service that you can think of
3. The phrase “_is short for_” in paragraph 2 can best be replaced by ________

Choose the best answer:
I/ have never/ be/ more beautiful/ a waterfall/ before.

Choose the best answer:
Minh used to _____ his homework late in the evening.

Choose the best answer:
My family enjoys ………… because we can sell vegetables and flowers ………… money.

Read the following passage and choose the best answer (A, B, C, D):
Some technological developments are the results of years of diligent work. Others are stumbled upon by accident. The discovery of X-rays is in the second category. In 1895, X-ray radiation was accidentally discovered by a physicist named Wilhelm Rontgen, while he was working in his lab. Rontgen discovery greatly advanced medical science. One night in 1895, Wilhelm Rontgen was working with an electric device called a Crookes tube. A Crookes tube is a glass tube with metal components inside it. When turned on, the tube produces a stream of electrons. Rontgen and other scientists observed a new form of energy escaping from the front end of the Crookes tube. Rontgen wanted to be the first to discover this new mysterious energy. To do this, he needed to make sure the tube was covered with black cardboard. This would make the room completely dark and allow him to better see this new form of energy. Rontgen was hoping to observe this new energy on a special screen that would be placed right in front of the Crookes tube. Amazingly, before the screen was placed near the Crookes tube, Rontgen already noticed the screen was glowing. He bought the screen closer, and the glow became brighter. (1) He then placed a book between the end of the tube and the screen-the glow was still there. (2) Rontgen realized that a new and different form of radiation must be causing the screen to glow. (3) As he didn't know what kind of radiation it was, he named it "X". (4) Rontgen soon started studying the new type of radiation. He designed experiments which allowed him to test how far X- rays could penetrate. He also had the bright idea of trying to take photographs with X-rays. One day, he tested his theories by asking his wife to put her hand between a photographic plate and a Crookes Tube. Sure enough, the resulting image of the bones in his wife's hand was the first ever X-ray photograph of the human body. After taking that first photograph, Rontgen understood how X-rays could benefit doctors and patients. He shared his discovery, and soon X-ray machines were appearing in hospitals. X-rays were very useful for medicine because they let doctors see a patient's bones. If a patient had a broken bone, it was made visible by the X-ray image. This let doctors know the right way to repair the fracture. Wilhelm Rontgen's accidental discovery has now been helping people for over one hundred years. Thanks to X-rays, broken bones can be repaired reliably and effectively. We should be grateful to Wilhelm Rontgen for making his discovery freely available and greatly advancing medical science. Because of this, we humans are able to live longer, healthier lives.
1. What was Wilhelm Rontgen's job?

Tom and Josh are discussing their summer vacation plan.

- Tom: “ _______.”

- Josh: “I don’t think that’s a good idea because it will be costly and strenuous.”

(100)______

Choose the best answer:
It is possible for local wildlife to coexist ...... industry.

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

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:
An air pollutnt is defined as a compound added directly or indirectly by humans to the atmosphere in such quantities as to affect humans, animals, vegetation, or materials adversely. Air pollution requires a very flexible definition that permits continuous change. When the first air pollution laws were established in England in the fourteenth century, air pollutants were limited to compounds that could be seen or smelled – a far cry from the extensive list of harmful subtances known today. As technology has developed and knowledge of the health aspects of various chemicals has increased, the list of air pollutants has lengthened. In the future, even water vapor might be considered an air pollutant under certain conditions.
Many of the more important air pollutants, such as sulfur oxides, carbon monoxide, and notrigen oxides, are found in nature. As the Earth developed, the concentration of these pollutants was altered by various chemical reactions; they became components in biogeochemical cycles. These serve as an air purification scheme by allowing the compounds to move from the air to the water or soil. On a global basis, nature’s output of these compounds dwarfs that resulting from human activities.
However, human production usually occurs in a localized area, such as as city. In such a region, human output may be dominant and may temporarily overload the natural purification scheme of the cycles. The result is an increased concentration of noxious chemicals in the air. The concentrations at which the adverse effects appear will be greater than the concentrations that the pollutants would have in the absence of human activities. The actual concentration need not be large for a subtance to be a pollutant; in fact, the numerial value tells us little until we know how much of an increase this represents over ther concentration that would occur naturally in the area. For example, sulfur dioxide has detectable health effects at 0.08 parts per million (ppm), which is about 400 times its natural level. Carbon monoxide, however, has a natural level of 0.1 ppm and is not usually a pollutant until its level reaches about 15 ppm.

According to the passage, the numerical value of the concentration level of a substance is only useful if     .

Read the passage below carefully, and then choose the best answer:
Raising a Child Athlete
In many countries, children with sporting potential are identified early and encouraged to achieve athletic greatness by training for hours every day. While some people see this as a great opportunity for kids to be healthy, others argue that too much focus on training can hurt young people. How parents should raise child athletes has become a big topic of their debate. People who are against such serious commitment to sport say that there are many negatives to training so intensively. Here are some of their arguments: The long hours spent training can distant the child from his or her family. thletes who spend too much time training miss out on education. The child may not be prepared for other real world activities, such as going to college and having a non-athletic job. Pressure from parents and coaches to win can be psychologically damaging for the child. Parents may also become too pushy and end up caring more about athletic achievements than the child. Dr. Christine Carr, a psychologist, suggests that parents take some important steps to make sure that their kids are getting the most out of sports. Carr says that the focus should be on the child’s happiness and about learning life lessons. Self-discipline, determination, and learning to deal with failure are some of the important life skills and lessons kids can learn from sports. Other experts point to the importance of letting children make their own decisions. Top athletes Tiger Woods and Michael Phelps have said that they appreciated their parents letting them decide how much or how little they wanted to train. In fact, according to Phelps’ mother, he had trouble focusing in the classroom until he found a sport that he was passionate about. By allowing Michael to focus on his sport, his mother also saw him improve as a student. Another thing that many parents and doctors agree on is the importance of developing a close relationship with the family. Dr. Carr suggests eating dinner together and says it is a simple way to remind children that family is important, and that support can always be found at home. Woods and Phelps both had supportive families and made it public, with parents attending their many competitions. Raising an athlete is not easy. By balancing life and training, parents can set their children up for success and help them become winners in sports and in life.
2. The purpose of the second paragraph is to _________.

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

"In the home a dad is very important. He is the (1)……who provides us with money to feed and (2)….. ourselves. He can decorate your bedroom, mend your radio, make (3)….. for your pets, repair a puncture your bicycle tyre and help you with maths homework. A dad can be very useful for (4)…. you in the car to and from parties, music and dancing lessons.
 A dad is the person whom you ask for (5)…. money. He is the one who (6)…. about the time you spend talking on the phone, as he has to pay for the bills. Dad is someone who will support you in an (7)…. , if he believes you to be right. He is someone who reads your school (8) …. And treats if it is good. A dad likes to come into a nice happy home evening, and settle (9)…. in his chair with a newspaper. He likes to (10) ….  his National Service days."

1. He is the (1)……who provides us with money to feed 

Find the word which has a different sound in the part underlined