Our new neighbors are quite nice _____ they are sometimes talkative.

(297)_______

Choose the best answer:
What is a washing machine used _________?

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

A small side door led into the whitewashed corridor from which the three bedrooms opened. We (1) __________ at once to the one in which Miss Stoner was now sleeping, and in which her sister (2)____________ her fate. It was a cosy little room, with a low ceiling and a gaping fireplace, the style of old country houses. A brown chest of drawers stood in one corner, a narrow bed in (3)___________, and a dressing table on the left-hand side of the window. These articles, with two small wickerwork chairs, (4)__________ all the furniture in the room, save for a square of Wilton carpet in the centre. Holmes drew one of the chairs into a corner and sat in (5) _________, while his eyes travelled round and round and up and down, taking in every detail of the apartment

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

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Billboards that Recognize You
Have you ever felt you were being watched? Some new technologies might make you feel that way. Digital billboards are being created that have the ability to recognize certain characteristics. These high-tech devices have cameras pointed at the people on the street, and software that tries to recognize people by age and gender. A computer inside the billboard then uses this information to display ads that are directed at the people who are looking at the billboard. For example, if a man passes a billboard featuring an ad for cosmetics, the computer can change the ad to something that is more likely to catch the man’s attention, such as a restaurant, or sporting goods. While advertisers see this as a great opportunity to reach their target customers, some people feel that this kind of profiling is an invasion of their privacy. People are now much more aware of how information is exposed, shared, bought, and sold on the Internet. Now this debate will include technologies such as these “smart” billboards. But advertisers claim that they are sensitive to people’s concern about privacy – companies that have tested the billboards in Japan and the US assure consumers that the billboards can only guess your age and gender, but they will not be able to recognize your face or obtain any personal information about you. Until recently, this kind of “personal” advertising has been mostly limited to the Internet. Search engines like Google and Bing can follow what we search for because each computer that connects to those sites has a unique identity. Companies then pay search engines to use this information to display ads for products and services that you have searched for. So if you search for travel information, you are likely to see ads for airlines and hotels. This kind of advertising has proven to be much more effective and valuable than traditional advertising. In addition to taking steps to deliver more personalized messages, advertisers are using billboards to offer more useful information. Digital billboards can connect to the Internet to display information such as the time, weather, and news headlines. In the future, this technology could be used to reflect activity on social media sites or to broadcast ads that relate to local events. In today’s world, people ignore thousands of ads every day. Advertisers are trying to change that trend by personalizing the experience of seeing an ad. So pay attention the next time you see a billboard – it could be talking to you.
8. What is the reason for advertisers making high-tech billboards?

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 ____.

Read the passage below carefully, and then choose the best answer:
Fighting Back against Bullying
It is often said that childhood is the most joyful period in a person’s life. This is supposed to be a time when children can focus on their studies and enjoy their free time with friends. However, these days more and more children are experiencing a stressful and miserable adolescence due to bullying. Bullying occurs when one student, or a group of students, uses aggression to harm another child and try to make them feel bad. This abuse can either be physical, such as pushing or beating another student, or it could take the form of mental abuse, such as taunting and teasing the student. Although it may seem harmless to some, studies show that bullying can greatly impact a child’s life and have long-lasting negative effects. People who have been bullied may experience self-esteem issues and start to lack confidence in almost everything they do. These traits can make it difficult to manage relationships and even cause them to have trouble holding down a steady job. One of the most harmful types of bullying that is on the rise is cyberbullying. The bullied student is targeted in cruel or threatening e-mails, instant messages, or hateful public posts about them. In many cases, bullies will post embarrassing pictures of the victim or spread nasty rumors about them through social media. In some tragic cases, children have even turned to suicide, feeling that they can’t deal with the humiliation. If you are being bullied by another student, you don’t have to accept it or suffer. There are some steps you can take to deal with the problem. At first, you may try to ignore the bully, as they will often lose interest in bothering you if you don’t react. If the bullying persists, however, you should tell a trusted adult as soon as possible. This could be a parent, a family friend, a teacher, a school guidance counselor, or even the school principal. Until recently, many teachers and school officials turned a blind eye to bullying, believing that the students would eventually sort it out by themselves. But this mindset has changed in recent years in light of some of the tragedies that have occurred. If for any reason you feel that your complaints are not being taken seriously, there are other groups available online who will help you deal with bullying. By dealing with bullying at an early stage, you can stop it before it gets much worse.
3. What does the author suggest that students should do if someone starts to bully them?

Choose the best answer: 

You ...................... your new hat when I ...................... you yesterday. 

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:
Animals have an intuitive awareness of quantities. They know without analysis the difference between a number of objects and a smaller number. In his book "The Natural History of Selboure" (1786), the naturalist Gilbert White tells how he surreptitiously removed one egg a day from a plover's nest, and how the mother laid another egg each day to make up for the missing one. He noted that other species of birds ignore the absence of a single egg but abandon their nest if more than one egg has been removed. It has also been noted by naturalists that a certain type of wasp always provides five - never four, never six - caterpillars for each of their eggs so that their young have something to eat when the eggs hatch. Research has also shown that both mice and pigeons can be taught to distinguish between odd and even numbers of food pieces.
These and similar accounts have led some people to infer that creatures other than humans can actually count. They also point to dogs that have been taught to respond to numerical questions with the correct number of banks, or to horses that seem to solve arithmetic problems by stomping their hooves the proper number of times.
Animals respond to quantities only when they are connected to survival as a species - as in the case of the eggs - or survival as individuals - as in the case of food. There is no transfer to other situations of from concrete reality to the abstract notion of numbers. Animals can "count" only when the objects are present and only when the numbers involved are small - not more than seven or eight. In lab experiments, animals trained to "count" one kind of object were unable to count any other type. The object, not the numbers, are what interest them. Animals' admittedly remarkable achievements simply do not amount to evidence of counting, nor do they reveal more than innate instincts, refined by the genes of successive generations, or the results of clever, careful conditioning by trainers.

According to information in the passage, which of the following is LEAST likely to occur as a result of animals' intuitive awareness of quantities?

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:
First used in the 1950s, shipping containers are, in many (1)__________, the symbol of our time. They have helped globalization come in being. Before shipping containers, goods were loaded and unloaded by (2)__________. Each package had to be carried onto the ship, tied down with ropes and then untied and carried out at the other end. (3)___________ unloading a single ship could take 20 men a week, making goods from abroad very expensive. Nowadays, three people operating three cranes can unload a ship in about ten hours. The largest modern ships are four football pitches long and can carry almost 15,000 containers. This has made shipping costs low, which has (4)___________ in cheaper goods all over the world and has affected all our lives dramatically. So next time you buy a T-shirt, a book, or an electronic gadget which was made in another country, remember that it is only (5)__________       because of those big metal boxes.

Choose the best answer:
What he has done to me_______.

Choose the best answer:
Have you ever _______ a vacation abroad?

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:
In ancient times, some of the first celebrities were Roman gladiators. Rather like today’s TV talent-show contestants, these men fought each other for the audience’s entertainment. Fast forward to the 18th century, it was politicians and preachers who were able to become celebrities through public (1)__________. George Whitefield, for example, a preacher from England, (2)___________ a crowd of 30,000 when he visited the US city of Boston. It’s no wonder he was called ‘Anglo-America’s first modern celebrity’. In the 19th century, the arrival of cheap newspapers created a sudden (3)___________ for exciting stories. All kinds of people began to get their 15 minutes of fame, including the legendary American outlaw and bank robber, Jesse James, and one of the world’s first media celebrities, Sam Patch. Patch became famous for jumping into rivers from high places, and he became a (4)___________ name by leaping into Niagara Falls. He survived every jump, except the last one into the Genesee River in New York. In the same way that the media is held (5)___________ for celebrity problems today, people blamed the pressure of the media for Patch’s sudden end.

Chọn câu đồng nghĩa:
Did you happen to run into George last week?

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. 
1. The word "ubiquitous" in the first sentence is closest in meaning to

Read the passage below carefully, and then choose the best answer:
The Brain: Myths and Facts
There are a lot of myths about the human brain. We are going to tell you a little about these myths, and we are also going to give you the truth. One of the biggest myth is that we only use 10 percent of our brains. The next part of that myth is that if we can learn to use the rest of our brains, then we will be much smarter. People say this all the time, but it is absolutely not true. The truth is that although we don’t know everything about the human brain, we know that each part of it has an important function. Modern scientists call the “10 percent myth” ridiculous. The other most popular myth is about being “right brained” or “left brained”. According to this myth, people who use the right side of their brains tend to be more artistic and creative. People who use the left side of their brains tend to be better at maths and science. This myth is as popular as the 10 percent myth, and it is also wrong. In 2013, a study at an American university examined the right brain and left brain myth. According to the study, we use both sides of our brains equally. It is true that we use different parts of our brains for different things: We use our left side for language more, and our right side when we need to pay attention. But there is no evidence that creative people use the right side more, or that scientific people use the left side more. We have talked about myths, so let’s look at a few interesting facts about the brain. First of all, the brain feels no pain. Second, about 75 percent of the brain is made of water. It is also the fattest organ in your body. Another interesting fact about the brain is that around the time you turn 18 years old, it stops growing.
7. Which of the following is NOT true about the human brain?

Read the passage below carefully, and then choose the best answer:
Clean and Popular
Wind power is a very clean source of energy. This is how wind power works. Wind makes windmills spin. When the windmills spin, they make electricity. Then we can use the electricity. Many people think that wind power is new, but that is not true. For thousands of years, people have used wind to sail boats and move water. We still do those things today, but these days we mostly use wind power to make electricity. Wind power is a very popular source of energy. Most people think that should use it more and more. First of all, it is clean. Windmills don’t pollute the environment at all. Second, we can use wind power forever. After all, we will always have wind. In addition, wind power is cheap, and it is getting even cheaper. A lot of people don’t understand wind power very well. They believe that there are problems with wind power, but many of those problems are not real. For example, some people say that windmills are dangerous for birds. That used to be true, but it isn’t true anymore. Old windmills killed birds because they spun very fast. New windmills spin slowly, and they aren’t dangerous for birds. However, there are real problems with windmills. One problem is that many people think windmills are very ugly. This is a problem for some people, because windmills are often in very pretty areas. Besides, wind doesn’t blow all the time, so we can’t use wind power all year round. Finally, windmills are noisy. Wind power is becoming more and more common. Right now, more than 80 countries use wind power. About 2.5 percent of the world’s power comes from the wind. For some countries, that number is a lot higher. Wind power gives Denmark more than 25 percent of its electricity.
6. Why don’t new windmills kill birds?

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

LOWELL (March 3) – Just one year after opening, Viggo's Sweet Shop on Park Street has become the place to go for residents wishing to satisfy their sugary cravings. Says owner Viggo Magnusson, "Returning customers bring friends and relatives with them, so the shop is always ---1---." Mr. Magnusson credits the success of his business to the recipes he inherited from his grandmother about a decade ago. ---2---. But the popularity of the pastry shop ---3--- Mr. Magnusson with an unanticipated problem: lack of store space. So when the shoe store next door went out of business recently, he purchased the property to allow for the ---4--- of his shop. Renovations will start in April.

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D to indicate the sentence that best combines each pair of sentences in the following questions.
The demand was so great. They had to reprint the book immediately.

Choose the best answer:
We would love _______ three cups of coffee.

Choose the best answer:
The mournful song ___________ the tone for the funeral.