Choose the best answer:
I’ll be in trouble if I _________my passport.

 

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The Internet: Changing Everything
Let’s do a little experiment: Take five minutes, and find some information about Angola. How did you get your information? How much information were you able to get? Chances are, you probably just went online and typed the word “Angola”. You were probably able to find out all sorts of things. This experiment shows us how useful the Internet is. Over the last 20 years, the Internet has changed the way that we live, work, and study. The biggest change has been the way that we access information. Twenty years ago, you would have needed an encyclopedia to learn about Angola. If you had wanted information, you would have had to get out of your chair, open your encyclopedia, and look up the word “Angola”. Today all you need is about five seconds and you’ll have the exact same information. This technology makes work a lot faster and more efficient. It has also made information storage a lot easier and neater. Twenty years ago, offices had papers and files all over the place. If you wanted to find a file, you had to open a desk drawer and find the right piece of paper. Today, many of us keep our files in cloud storage. Cloud storage is a technology that lets people store files on the Internet. All you have to do is to sign into the site, and you can find all of your files in seconds. Another big change is communication. These days more and more people are working from home. People have “home offices”. They just do their work at their house and e-mail it to their company. It makes life a lot easier. Some people don’t like these changes. They say that life is too convenient these days, and it is making people lazy. However, most people think that even if this technology makes us a little easier, it still has more benefits than disadvantages. In the end, it doesn’t matter what we think. The Internet has changed all of our lives forever.
1. If you use cloud storage, where are your files?

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The Film and the Novel: Twilight
When a popular book gets made into a movie, there will always be a debate about whether the novel or film is better. The filmmakers always have to consider certain things: do they want to follow the book closely to please dedicated readers, or do they want to change parts of the book if they don’t translate well on-screen? No matter what they do, there will always be people who feel the movie will never be as good as the book, people who will love the movie without ever reading the book, and people who enjoy both. The vampire series Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer, became so popular that movie companies wanted to produce it for the big screen. Most Twilight fans were excited about seeing characters such as Edward and Bella “come to life,” but there were other fans who did not trust the movie script. They assumed the scriptwriters would change parts of the story to make it seem more interesting as a movie. By the time the first Twilight movie was released, millions of people had read the series. Many of these people went on to watch the film, which made $35.7 million just on its opening day. While many fans and critics liked it and said the movie more or less followed the book’s storyline, some fans were not impressed. One change that angered them was that certain sound effects were added to the movie, such as a “whooshing” sound when the vampires jumped. This was not mentioned in the book, and many fans felt that it was too distracting. Those who liked the movie said that they enjoyed the light mood and excitement. This was very different from the book. The writing in Twilight is dark and gloomy, like many vampire novels. The movie, however, added more energy to the story and more personality to the characters. For example, many characters in the book are portrayed as being quiet, and they spend most of their time at school. But in the movie, the characters are cooler and funnier – one scene even shows them going surfing together. The director of the first movie, Catherine Hardwicke, thought it was important for the characters to be believable. She wanted them to have a wide variety of emotions, since the series is for, and about, teenagers. In the end, the films were considered a success, even if there were both happy and unhappy fans. It’s a great accomplishment to make films that are watched by millions of people, and you can’t expect to be able to please everyone all of the time.
5. According to the passage, what was NOT changed for the movie?

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:
Composers today use a wider variety of sounds than ever before, including many that were once considered undesirable noises. Composer Edgard Varese (1883-1965) called thus the “liberation of sound…the right to make music with any and all sounds.” Electronic music, for example – made with the aid of computers, synthesizers, and electronic instruments – may include sounds that in the past would not have been considered musical.
Enviromental sounds, such as thunder, and electronically generated hisses and blips can be recorded, manipulated, and then incorporated into a musical composition. But composers also draw novel sounds from voices and non-electronic instruments. Singers may be asked to scream, laugh, groan, sneeze, or to sing phonetic sounds rather than words. Wind and string players may lap or scrape their instruments. A brass or woodwind player may hum while playing, to produce two pitches at once; a pianist may reach inside the piano to pluck a string and then run a metal blade along it. In the music of the Western world, the greatest expansion and experimentation have involved percussion instruments, which outnumber strings and winds in many recent compositions. Traditional persussion instruments are struck with new types of beaters; and instruments that used to be couriered unconventional in Western music – tom-toms, bongos, slapsticks, maracas – are widely used.
In the search for novel sounds, increased use has been made in Western music of Microtones. Non-Western music typically divides and intervals between two pitches more finely than Western music does, thereby producing a greater number of distinct tones or micro tones, within the same interval. Composers such as Krzysztof Penderecki create sound that borders on electronic noise through tone clusters – closely spaced tones played together and heard as a mass, block, or band of sound. The directional aspect of sound has taken on new importance as well Loudspeakers or groups of instruments may be placed at opposite ends of the stage, in the balcony, or at the back and sides of the auditorium. Because standard music notation makes no provision for many of these innovations, recent music scores may contain graph like diagrams, new note shapes and symbols, and novel ways of arranging notation on the page.

The passage suggests that Edgard Varese is an example of a composer who

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Many countries in Asia agreed to _____ diplomatic relations.

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Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum is the final resting place of Ho Chi Minh, the __________ iconic and popular leader of Vietnam.

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 
Are Human Beings Getting Smarter?
Do you think you are smarter than your parents or grandparents? According to James Flynn, a professor at a New Zealand university, you might be. Over the course of the last century, IQ test scores of people in some countries have got increasingly better - on average, three points better for every decade that has passed. This trend of improving scores is known as “the Flynn effect,” and scientists want to know what is behind it. IQ tests and other similar tests are designed to measure general intelligence rather than knowledge. Flynn knew that intelligence is partly inherited from our parents and partly the result of our environment and experiences, but the improvement in test scores was happening too quickly to be explained by heredity. So what happened in the 20th century that led to higher test scores? Scientists have proposed several explanations for the Flynn effect. Some suggest that the improved test scores simply reflect an increased exposure to tests in general. Because we take so many tests, we learn test-taking techniques that help us perform better. Others have pointed to better nutrition, which results in babies being born larger, healthier, and with more brain development than in the past. Another possible explanation is a change in educational styles - children are encouraged to discover things for themselves rather than just memorizing information. This could prepare people to do the kind of problem-solving that intelligence tests require. Flynn himself suggested that learning new technologies may have improved people’s problem-solving skills. This may be true for the first decade of his tests, when IQ scores in many countries increased. However, in recent years, IQ test scores in some countries have begun to decline. Data from Norway, the Netherlands, Australia, and Great Britain have shown that as these countries become more and more modern, IQ scores have begun to drop. While scientists aren’t sure what is causing this decline, they think technology is dramatically changing the way that we learn and get information. For example, people are now able to access all kinds of information easily using online resources like Google or Wikipedia. The danger is when they start to rely too much on these sources of information, and not do any thinking for themselves. Lifestyle changes that come with modem technology may also have a negative effect on intelligence, such as video games and television making people less social.  So while the world may have got smarter over the 20th century, improving technology and changing lifestyles may soon reverse that trend

IQ test evaluate our ____

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Can/ you/ list/ name/ all/ World’s Heritages?

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions form 31 -35

Tourism will always have an impact on the places visited. Sometimes the impact is good, but often it is negative. For example, if lots of people visit one place, then this can damage the environment. The question is - how can we minimize the problems without preventing people from travelling and visiting places? 

The main aim of ecotourism is to reduce the negative impact that tourism has on the environment and local people. The idea is to encourage tourists to think about what they do when they visit a place. 

It's great to talk about protecting the environment, but how do you actually do this? There are a number of key points. Tourists shouldn't drop litter, they should stay on the paths, they shouldn't interfere with wildlife and they should respect local customs and traditions. 

Some people see ecotourism as a contradiction. They say that any tourism needs infrastructure - roads, airports and hotels.The more tourists that visit a place, the more of these are needed and, by building more of these, you can't avoid damaging the environment. 

But, of course, things aren't so black and white. Living in a place of natural beauty doesn't mean that you shouldn't benefit from things like better roads. As long as the improvements benefit the local people and not just the tourists, and the local communities are consulted on plans and changes, then is there really a problem? 

In 2002 the United Nations celebrated the "International Year of Ecotourism". Over the past twenty years, more and more people have started taking eco-holidays. In countries such as Ecuador, Nepal, Costa Rica and Kenya, ecotourism represents a significant proportion of the tourist industry. 

In paragraph 1, the word "it" refers to ____.

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The ubiquitous bar code, developed more than twenty years ago, is not a stagnant product. On the contrary, the technology has been improved so that it can be used more efficiently. Much less expensive than a computer chip, the bar code can hold more information than it had in the past by adding a second dimension to the structure. The bar code consists of a series of parallel vertical bars or lines of two different widths, although sometimes four widths are used, printed in black on a white background. Barcodes are used for entering data into a computer system. The bars represent the binary digits 0 and 1, just like basic computer language, and sequences of these digits can indicate the numbers from 0 to 9, which can then be read by an optical laser scanner and processed by a digital computer. Arabic numbers appear below the code. The traditional bar code has been used to monitor skiers at ski lifts and to determine price and perform inventory control on groceries, drugs, medical supplies, manufactured parts, and library books to name a few. The bar code used on grocery products, introduced in the 1970s, is called a universal product code (or UPC) and assigns each type of food or grocery product a unique code. The five digits on the left are assigned to a particular manufacturer or maker and the five digits on the right are used by that manufacturer to identify a specific type or mark of product. Traditional single dimension bar codes are not readily customizable because there is little extra space. The two-dimensional bar code, with an information density of 1,100 bytes, allows a considerably greater amount of information to be coded than does the traditional bar code, including customized information. [A] It also has built-in redundancy, meaning that the identical information is duplicated on the same code. [B] Therefore, if the code is damaged, it can still be read. [C] The technology even allows pictures or texts to be contained within the code, as well as bar code encryption. [D] The new technology dramatically reduces the errors of the single dimensional bar code and reduces the enormous costs that some companies have reported in the past. 
10. The word "considerably" in the final paragraph is closest in meaning to: 

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 following questions from 35 to 42. 
What is commonly called pepper in reality comes from two very different families of plants. Black and white pepper both come from the fruit of the Piper nigrum, a vine with fruits called peppercorns. The peppercorns turn from green to red as they ripen and finally blacken as they dry out. The dried-out peppercorns are ground to obtain black pepper. White pepper, which has a more subtle flavour than black pepper, comes from the same peppercorns as black pepper. To obtain white pepper, the outer hull of the peppercorn, the pericarp, is removed before the peppercorn is ground. Red and green pepper, on the other hand, come from a completely different family from black and white pepper. Red and green peppers are from the genus Capsicum. Plants of this type generally have tiny white flowers and fruit which can be any of a number of colours, shapes and sizes. These peppers range in flavour from very mild and sweet to the most incredibly burning taste imaginable. Bell peppers are the most mild, while habanros are the most burning. 
Christopher Columbus is responsible for the present-day confusion over what pepper is. The Piper nigrum variety of pepper was highly valued for centuries, and high demand for pepper by Europeans was a major cause of the fifteen-century push to locate ocean routes to the spice-growing regions of Asia. When Columbus arrived in the New World in 1492, he was particularly interested in finding black pepper because of the high price it would command in Europe. Columbus came across plants from the Capsicum family in use among people of the New World, and he incorrectly identified them as relatives of black pepper. Columbus introduced the spicy Capsicum chili peppers to Europeans on his return from the 1492 voyage, and traders later spread them to Asia and Africa. These Capsicum peppers have continued to be called peppers in spite of the fact that they are not related to the black and white pepper of the Piper nigrum family. 

What part of the Piper nigrum is the pericarp? 

Most doctors and nurses have to work on a ____ once or twice a week at the hospital.

(188)_______

 Most ____ are at senior level, requiring appropriate qualifications.

(240)__________

Choose the best answer:
Nam's new school ………. a large …………

Read the reading below carefully, and then complete it with the best option A, B, C or D given below:
Many parents believe that they should begin to teach their children to read when they are (1)________ more than toddlers. This is fine if the child shows a real interest but forcing a child could be counter-productive if she isn't ready. Wise parents will have a (2) ________attitude and take the lead from their child. What they should provide is a selection of stimulating toys, books and other activities. Nowadays there is plenty of good (3) ________available for young children, and of course, seeing plenty of books in use about the house will also (4) ________them to read. Of course, books are no longer the only source of stories and information. There is also a huge range (5)_______ videos, which can reinforce and extend the pleasure a child finds in a book and are equally valuable in helping to increase vocabulary and concentration. Television gets a bad review as far as children are concerned, mainly because too many spend too much time watching programmes not intended for their age group

Read the reading below carefully, and then complete it with the best option A, B, C or D given below:
Many parents believe that they should begin to teach their children to read when they are (1)________ more than toddlers. This is fine if the child shows a real interest but forcing a child could be counter-productive if she isn't ready. Wise parents will have a (2) ________attitude and take the lead from their child. What they should provide is a selection of stimulating toys, books and other activities. Nowadays there is plenty of good (3) ________available for young children, and of course, seeing plenty of books in use about the house will also (4) ________them to read. Of course, books are no longer the only source of stories and information. There is also a huge range (5)_______ videos, which can reinforce and extend the pleasure a child finds in a book and are equally valuable in helping to increase vocabulary and concentration. Television gets a bad review as far as children are concerned, mainly because too many spend too much time watching programmes not intended for their age group

Read the following passage and choose the best answer (A, B, C, D):
The ubiquitous bar code, developed more than twenty years ago, is not a stagnant product. On the contrary, the technology has been improved so that it can be used more efficiently. Much less expensive than a computer chip, the bar code can hold more information than it had in the past by adding a second dimension to the structure. The bar code consists of a series of parallel vertical bars or lines of two different widths, although sometimes four widths are used, printed in black on a white background. Barcodes are used for entering data into a computer system. The bars represent the binary digits 0 and 1, just like basic computer language, and sequences of these digits can indicate the numbers from 0 to 9, which can then be read by an optical laser scanner and processed by a digital computer. Arabic numbers appear below the code. The traditional bar code has been used to monitor skiers at ski lifts and to determine price and perform inventory control on groceries, drugs, medical supplies, manufactured parts, and library books to name a few. The bar code used on grocery products, introduced in the 1970s, is called a universal product code (or UPC) and assigns each type of food or grocery product a unique code. The five digits on the left are assigned to a particular manufacturer or maker and the five digits on the right are used by that manufacturer to identify a specific type or mark of product. Traditional single dimension bar codes are not readily customizable because there is little extra space. The two-dimensional bar code, with an information density of 1,100 bytes, allows a considerably greater amount of information to be coded than does the traditional bar code, including customized information. [A] It also has built-in redundancy, meaning that the identical information is duplicated on the same code. [B] Therefore, if the code is damaged, it can still be read. [C] The technology even allows pictures or texts to be contained within the code, as well as bar code encryption. [D] The new technology dramatically reduces the errors of the single dimensional bar code and reduces the enormous costs that some companies have reported in the past. 
6. Which of the following can be a UPC symbol?

Read the passage below carefully, and then choose the best answer:
Strengthening Your Core
If there is one indication that someone is fit, it is a tight and lean stomach. Men and women alike hope that eating right and putting in hard work at the gym will earn them a perfect six-patch. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. The rising popularity of fast food has led to an increase of obesity rates and waistlines around the globe. If someone is out of shape, you will notice the extra weight around their midsection. In both cases, a person’s core muscles seem to tell a lot about their fitness and eating habits. Many people associate the core with just the stomach area, but science actually defines it as our body without arms and legs. Although many people want a solid core to look good, the development of these muscles affects many areas of our lives. In athletics and general life for that matter, we all rely on our core muscles heavily to get things done. Studies have shown that athletes who build a powerful core foundation aren’t injured as much. Meanwhile, the benefits of your average Joe may be even greater. Ordinary people use their core muscles for nearly every task they do. This includes picking things up, sitting in a chair, or tying your shoes. Our core muscles provide stability, so we can keep our balance and easily move in any direction. If we neglect them, life can become much more difficult. As a result, we should always consider our core muscles when designing our workouts. However, if you have been sedentary for years, performing thousands of repetitions will probably get you injured. Instead, start off slowly and gradually build up your numbers. An excellent exercise for both beginners and advanced exercisers is the plank. You simply get in an extended pushup position as if you have just finished a rep. Maintain this position, but place the weight on your forearms instead of your hands. Then, hold the position as long as you can. You should feel your core muscles working hard to help your hands and support the weight of your body. In the beginning, you may only be able to hold it for a few seconds, but keep at it. The Guinness World Record for abdominal planking is three hours and seven minutes.
2. What is the second paragraph mainly about?

Choose the best answer:
You/ the Statue of Liberty/ when/ should/ visit/ visiting/ New York.

Read the following passage and choose the best answer (A, B, C, D):
Vycorp Industries has announced a new initiative to reduce the amount of heat created by its data servers. Rather than inventing new cooling systems, it aims to use the ocean.1 -------. At present, thermal management requires tech companies to spend large portions of their annual budgets on cooling and ventilation systems. But by installing them deep underwater, where temperatures are always near freezing, Vycorp says it can naturally -------2 millions of dollars in cooling expenses. “We expect------- 3, benefits,” said Chief Technology Officer Shannon Simmons. “By using the ocean as a heat sink, we'll be able to deliver the same services we always have with much more 4 -------“.

Read the following passage and choose the best answer (A, B, C, D):
Harvard University, today recognized as part of the top echelon of the world's universities, came from very inauspicious and humble beginning. This oldest of American universities was founded in 1636, just sixteen years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. Included in the Puritan emigrants to the Massachusetts colony during this period were more than 100 graduates of England's prestigious Oxford and Cambridge universities, and these universities graduates in the New Word were determined that their sons would have the same educational opportunities that they themselves had had. Because of this support in the colony for an institution of higher learning, the General Court of Massachusetts appropriated 400 pounds for a college in October of 1636 and early the following year decided on a parcel of land for the school; this land was in an area called Newetowne, which was later renamed Cambridge after its English cousin and is the site of the present-day university. When a young minister named John Harvard, who came from the neighboring town of Charlestown, died from tuberculosis in 1638, he willed half of his estate of 1,700 pounds to the fledgling college. In spite of the fact that only half of the bequest was actually paid, the General Court named the college after the minister in appreciation for what he had done. The amount of the bequest may not have been large, particularly by today's standard, but it was more than the General Court had found it necessary to appropriate in order to open the college. Henry Dunster was appointed the first president of Harvard in 1640, and it should be noted that in addition to serving as president, he was also the entire faculty, with an entering freshmen class of four students. Although the staff did expand somewhat, for the first century of its existence the entire teaching staff consisted of the president and three or four tutors.
5. The word "pounds" in paragraph 2 are probably: