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When it comes to carnivals, few can rival the world famous Notting Hill Carnival. The carnival is the undoubted highlight for much of the West London community, attracting more than one million people every year. (1) ___________ becoming an annual event in 19665, the Notting Hill Carnival has grown to become the second biggest street festival in the world – bettered only by the Rio Carnival in Brazil. The event is led by members of the West Indian community to (2) ________ the entire community of Notting Hill and beyond together in celebration of music, dancing, colour and food. First held in 1959, just a year after the Notting Hill riots, the carnival has been transformed from a small indoor event into one that generates (3) __________ estimated £93m for the London economy. But what brings more than a million people to the Notting Hill carnival? Well, there is the attraction of more than 20 miles of some of the most vibrant, (4) ___________ and outlandish costumes that you will ever see, as well as some fantastic food stalls and cool Caribbean (5) ___________ but the 40,000 volunteers work hard to make this an event for people from all walks of life

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Urban development is having a direct impact on the weather in (1) ______ cities worldwide. It has been noticed that the difference in temperature is usually greater at night and the phenomenon occurs in both winter and summer. Experts agree that this is due to urban development, when open green spaces are replaced with asphalt roads and tall brick or concrete buildings. These materials retain heat generated by the Sun and release it through the night. In Atlanta, in the US, this has even led to thunderstorms (22) ______ occur in the morning rather than, as is more common, in the afternoon. Large cities around the world are adopting strategies to combat this issue, (3) ______ it is not uncommon to find plants growing on top of roofs or down the walls of large buildings. In Singapore, the government has (4) ______ to transform it into a "city within a garden" and, in 2006, they held an international competition calling for entries to develop a master plan to help bring this about. One outcome was the creation of 18 "Supertrees" – metal constructions resembling very tall trees. Each one is a vertical freestanding garden and is (5) ______ to exotic plants and ferns. They also contain solar panels used to light the trees at night and also containers to collect rainwater, making them truly self-sufficient

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Many prehistoric people subsisted as hunters and gatherers. Undoubtedly, game  animals, including some very large species, provided major components of human diets. An important controversy centering on the question of human effects on prehistoric  wildlife concerns the sudden disappearance of so many species of large animals at or near the end of the Pleistocene epoch. Most paleontologists suspect that abrupt changes in climate led to the mass extinctions. Others, however, have concluded that prehistoric people drove many of those species to extinction through overhunting. In their “Pleistocene overkill hypothesis,” they cite what seems to be a remarkable coincidence between the arrival of prehistoric peoples in North and South America and the time during which mammoths, giant ground sloths, the giant bison, and numerous other large mammals became extinct.  Perhaps the human species was driving others to extinction long before the dawn of history. Hunter-gatherers may have contributed to Pleistocene extinctions in more indirect ways. Besides overhunting, at least three other kinds of effects have been suggested: direct competition, imbalances between competing species of game animals, and early agricultural practices. Direct competition may have brought about the demise of large carnivores such as the saber-toothed cats. These animals simply may have been unable to compete with the increasingly sophisticated hunting skills of Pleistocene people.  Human hunters could have caused imbalances among game animals, leading to the extinctions of species less able to compete. When other predators such as the gray wolf prey upon large mammals, they generally take high proportions of each year’s crop of young. Some human hunters, in contrast, tend to take the various age-groups of large animals in proportion to their actual occurrence. If such hunters first competed with the larger predators and then replaced them, they may have allowed younger to survive each year, gradually increasing the populations of favored species. As these populations expanded, they in turn may have competed with other game species for the same environmental niche, forcing the less hunted species into extinction. This theory, suggests that human hunters played an indirect role in Pleistocene extinctions by hunting one species more than another. 
6. The highlighted word “they” in the passage refers to ___________

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This drink isn't beneficial for health. You ____ drink it too much.

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_______ sort of music does your father enjoy listening to?

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With 13,000 floral species and over 15,000 faunal species, three newly discovered big animal species, and a ratio of country/world species of 6.3%. Vietnam has enormous tourismparticularly ecotourism-potential. In fact, since 1986, when Renovation Reforms began the shift from a centrally planned to a socialist-oriented market, or multi-sectoral, economy, tourism has been an sector of primary concern to the government. In May 1995, the prime minister of Vietnam approved a master plan of tourism development for the period 1995- 2010. In February 1999, the state decree on tourism was part of the socio-economic development strategy for the period 2001-2010 approved at the IX National Congress of the Party: “Tourism development has become a spearhead economic industry indeed. It is necessary to improve the quality and effectiveness of tourism activities, bringing into full play the natural conditions, and cultural and historical tradition to meet the domestic and international demand for tourism and to catch up with tourism development in the region” (Document of the IX National Congress 2001). Tourism has so far brought great benefits to the economy, but it has also contributed to environmental degradation, especially biodiversity deterioration. Thus, the concept of “sustainable development”-development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs - must be factored into tourism development. This consideration is reflected in the term “ecotourism,” which is referred to variously as ecological or environmental tourism, nature or green tourism, sustainable or responsible tourism. Ecotourism involves travel to relatively undisturbed natural areas with the specific object of studying, admiring, and enjoying scenery, plants, and animals, as well as any cultural features found in these areas. It is distinguished from mass or resort tourism by its lower impact on the environment, lower infrastructure requirements, and its role in educating tourists about natural environments and cultural values. Fully aware of its significance, the government of Vietnam has prioritized ecotourism in its strategy for tourism development to ensure both sustainability and economic benefits. Though ecotourism in Vietnam is at a beginning stage of development, it is expected to grow strongly through support from government and international organizations.  
6. What is the word "degradation" closest in meaning to?

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After years of hype and false starts, the shift to clean power has begun to accelerate at a pace that has taken the most experienced experts by surprise. Even leaders in the oil and gas sector have been forced to confront an existential question: will the 21st century be the last one for fossil fuels? It is early, but the evidence is mounting. Wind and solar parks are being built at unprecedented rates, threatening the business models of established power companies. Electric cars that were hard to even buy eight years ago are selling at an exponential rate, in the process driving down the price of batteries that hold the key to unleashing new levels of green growth. “This clean energy disruption has just started and what is striking is how much of a financial impact it is already having on some companies,” says Per Lekander, a portfolio manager at London’s Lansdowne Partners hedge fund, who has tracked global energy markets for more than 25 years. “It hit the electricity sector first, in Europe in 2013 and then the US two years later. Now it has spread to the auto sector and I think the oil industry is next.” The shift has come as increased government efforts to curb climate change and smog have driven down costs and spurred technical advances, creating a green energy industry that looks nothing like it did a decade ago: expensive and sluggish. Today, China and India have picked up the baton and are driving a sector that has spread to every continent. The result was a banner year for green energy in 2016  
2. The fear of leaders from oil and gas sector company comes from ____

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My mom is a pretty talented pianist. She reads music very well and loves to play  Chopin and various other classical artists. One of my earliest memories involves sitting under her piano bench while she played. It gave her a lot of joy and a lot of personal pride, I think. I trust that she naturally wanted those things for me when she enrolled me in piano lessons when I was about seven years old.  I hated them. I was scared of my teacher. I hated practicing. I hated the songs I was being forced to learn. I hated reading music. I was a young kid, and there were other things I wanted to do instead. It just didn’t interest me, and no amount of begging and pleading on my mother’s part could get me to enjoy practicing. One thing in particular that she used to say as she was begging me to practice was, “One day, when you’re older, you will cherish the ability to sit down and play.” Nevertheless, after a couple years of once-a-week torture, she finally allowed me to quit.  Years went by. I switched schools when I was 11 years old, got a new best friend, and got interested in music. This was a critical turning point. My best friend loved the band Bush and lots of other alternative bands of the ‘90s, and listening to them unlocked a whole new sonic world for me. I fell in love, fell completely and totally in love, with rock music.  My friend taught me the form for a power chord on her acoustic guitar. If you know how to play a power chord, you can play or at least convincingly fake pretty much every single rock song in the world. It was like someone had given me my first hit of a powerful opiate.  I spent hours practicing in my room. Hours sounding out my favourite songs. More hours playing along with those songs in front of my mirror, pretending I was Scott Weiland, Dolores O’Riordan, Chris Cornell, or my personal favourite Louise Post (of Veruca Salt). I unlocked a talent within myself that had gone obscenely undiscovered and undeveloped when I was a young child banging my head against a piano keyboard, trying and failing to read a piece of music - I could play the guitar by ear. I just hadn’t had the time to figure that out because my mom was trying so hard to get me to do something that did not come naturally to me and that I had no desire to do.
3. How many piano lessons per week did the writer have?

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It often takes me about fifteen minutes to go to work from here by foot.

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Mr O’Connor, a volunteer firefighter with the New South Wales Rural Fire Service (RFS), has used all seven weeks of his holiday leave, plus his three weeks of allotted sick leave, to fight fires across the state. Mr O’Connor is among the more than 72,000 members of the RFS, a volunteer force that is the largest firefighting service in the world. These volunteer services have been at the front line of the battle against ferocious bush fires across Australia that have already destroyed more than 10.7 million hectares, an area larger than South Korea. The RFS, which began 120 years ago, not only attends to bush fires and home and building fires but also assists in storms, search and rescue operations and car accidents. In 2018, it attended 26,903 incidents, including 10,036 bush fires and 1,283 building fires. Mr Mick Holton, president of the NSW Volunteer Fire Fighters Association, an organisation which represents volunteers, said people step up for various reasons, including altruism, social factors, a sense of adventure, or a desire to protect their own farms or houses. “People are happy to be part of a group that benefits the community. That is a large part of it for most volunteers. People have a sense that they want to help,” he told The Straits Times. But Australia’s bush fires are becoming more severe and more frequent. This year, many, like Mr O’Connor, have made large sacrifices to protect people and homes. Controversially, Prime Minister Scott Morrison agreed in late December to compensate some of the firefighters after coming under heavy pressure to provide them with support. The compensation scheme allows volunteers who are self-employed or work for small businesses to claim A$300 (S$277) per day if they have served more than 10 days this fire season. The maximum payment is A$6,000. But the move had been opposed by some senior firefighters, including the RFS Commissioner, Mr Shane Fitzsimmons, who has said that “For goodness sake, let’s not take away from the extraordinary spirit that is volunteerism.” But Mr Morrison insisted that: “While I know RFS volunteers don’t seek payment for their service, I don’t want to see volunteers or their families unable to pay bills or struggle financially as a result of the selfless contribution they are making.
6. The word “they” in paragraph refers 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:
It’s often said that we team things at the wrong time. University students frequently do the minimum of work because they’re crazy about a good social life instead. Children often scream before their piano practice 5 because it’s so boring. They have to be given gold stars and medals to be persuaded to swim, or have to be bribed to take exams. But the story is different when you’re older.
Over the years, I’ve done my share of adult learning. At 30, I went to a college and did courses in History and English. It was an amazing experience. For starters, I was paying, so there was no reason to be late - I was the one frowning and drumming my fingers if the tutor was late, not the other way round. Indeed, if I could persuade him to linger for an extra five minutes, it was a bonus, not a nuisance. I wasn’t frightened to ask questions, and homework was a pleasure not a pain. When I passed an exam, I had a big meal, not for my parents or my teachers. The satisfaction I got was entirely personal.
Some people fear going back to school because they worry that their brains have got rusty. But the joy is that, although some parts have rusted up, your brain has learnt all kinds of other things since you were young. It has learnt to think independently and flexibly and is much better at relating one thing to another. What you lose in the rust department, you gain in the maturity department.
In some ways, age is a positive plus. For instance, when you’re older, you get less frustrated. Experience has told you that, if you’re calm and simply do something carefully again and again, eventually you’ll get the hang of it. The confidence you have in other areas - from being able to drive a car, perhaps - means that if you can’t, say, build a chair instantly, you don’t, like a child, want to destroy your first pathetic attempts. Maturity tells you that you will, with application, eventually get there.
I hated piano lessons at school, but I was good at music. And coming back to it, with a teacher who could explain why certain exercises were useful and with musical concepts that, at the age of ten. I could never grasp, was magical. Initially, I did feel a bit strange, thumping out a piece that I’d played for my school exams, with just as little comprehension of what the composer intended as I’d had all those years before. But soon, complex emotions that I never knew poured out from my fingers, and suddenly I could understand why practice makes perfect.

All of the following are true about adult learning EXCEPT     .

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Sophia is a humanoid robot developed by Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics. She has been designed to learn and adapt to human behavior and work with humans, and has been interviewed around the world. In October 2017, she became a Saudi Arabian citizen, the first robot to receive citizenship of a country. According to herself, Sophia was activated on April 19, 2015. She is modeled after actress Audrey Hepbum,and is known for her human-like appearance and behavior compared to previous robotic variants. According to manufacturer, David Hanson, Sophia has artificial intelligence, visual data processing and facial recognition. Sophia also imitates human gestures and facial expressions and is able to answer certain questions and to make simple conversations on predefined topics (e.g. on the weather). The robot uses voice recognition technology from Alphabet Inc. (parent company of Google) and is designed to get smarter over time. Sophia’s intelligence software is designed by SingularityNET. The AI program analyses conversations and extracts data that allows her to improve responses in the future. It is conceptually similar to the computer program ELIZA, which was one of the first attempts at simulating a human conversation. Hanson designed Sophia to be a suitable companion for the elderly at nursing homes, or to help crowds at large events or parks. He hopes that she can ultimately interact with other humans sufficiently to gain social skills. Sophia has been interviewed in the same manner as a human, striking up conversations with hosts. Some replies have been nonsensical, while others have been impressive, such as lengthy discussions with Charlie Rose on 60 Minutes. In a piece for CNBC, when the interviewer expressed concerns about robot behavior, Sophia joked that he had “been reading too much Elon Musk, and watching too many Hollywood movies”. Musk tweeted that Sophia could watch The Godfather and suggested “What’s the worst that could happen?”. On October 11, 2017, Sophia was introduced to the United Nations with a brief conversation with the United Nations Deputy Secretary-General, Amina J. Mohammed. On October 25, at the Future Investment Summit in Riyadh, she was granted Saudi Arabian citizenship, becoming the first robot ever to have a nationality. This attracted controversy as some commentators wondered if this implied that Sophia could vote or marry, or whether a deliberate system shutdown could be considered murder. Social media users used Sophia’s citizenship to criticize Saudi Arabia’s human rights record. 
4. According to the passage, all of the following statements are true EXCEPT_________

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Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace do not help you make more  genuine close friends, according to a survey by researchers who studied how the websites are changing the nature of friendship networks. Although social networking on the internet helps people to collect hundreds or even thousands of acquaintances, the researchers believe that face to face contact is nearly always necessary to form truly close friendships.  “Although the numbers of friends people have on these sites can be massive, the actual number of close friends is approximately the same in the face to face real world,” said psychologist Will Reader, from Sheffield Hallam University. Social networking websites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace have taken off rapidly in recent years. Facebook was launched initially in 2004 for Harvard University members but has since expanded to more than 34 million users worldwide. MySpace, which was set up in 2003, has more than 200 million users and was bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in 2005 for $580m (£285m). Previous research has suggested that a person’s conventional friendship group consists of around 150 people, with five very close friends but larger numbers of people whom we keep in touch with less regularly. This figure is so consistent that scientists have suggested it is determined by the cognitive constraints of keeping up with large numbers of people. But Dr. Reader and his team have found that social networking sites do allow people to stretch this figure. The team asked more than 200 people to fill in questionnaires about their online networking, asking for example how many online friends they had, how many of these were close friends and how many they had met face to face. The team found that although the sites allowed contact with hundreds of acquaintances, as with conventional friendship networks, people tend to have around five close friends. Ninety per cent of contacts whom the subjects regarded as close friends were people they had met face to face. “People see face to face contact as being absolutely imperative in forming close friendships,” added Dr. Reader. He told the British Association Festival of Science in York that social networking sites allow people to broaden their list of nodding acquaintances because staying in touch online is easy. “What social network sites can do is decrease the cost of maintaining and forming these social networks because we can post information to multiple people,” he said.  But to develop a real friendship we need to see that the other person is trustworthy, said Dr. Reader. "What we need is to be absolutely sure that a person is really going to invest in us, is really going to be there for us when we need them … It’s very easy to be deceptive on the internet."
3. The word “constraints” in paragraph 3 is closest in meaning to __________________

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Elephants need a large amount of habitat because they eat so much. Humans have become their direct competitors for living space. Human populations in Africa and Asia have quadrupled since the turn of the century, the fastest growth rate on the planet. Forest and savanna habitat has been converted to cropland, pastureland for livestock, and timber for housing and fuel. Humans do not regard elephants as good neighbors. When humans and elephants live close together, elephants raid crops, and rogue elephants rampage through villages. Local people shoot elephants because they fear them and regard them as pests. Some countries have established culling programs: park officials or hunters kill a predetermined number of elephants to keep herds manageable and minimize human-elephant conflicts. Hunting has been a major cause of the decline in elephant populations. Elephants became prized trophies for big-game hunters after Europeans arrived in Africa. More recently, and more devastatingly, hunters have slaughtered elephants for their ivory tusks. The ivory trade became a serious threat to elephants in the 1970s. A sudden oil shortage caused the world economy to collapse, and ivory became more valuable than gold. In fact, ivory has been called “white gold” because it is beautiful, easily carved, durable, and pleasing to the touch. Most of the world’s ivory is carved in Japan, Hong Kong, and other Asian countries, where skilled carvers depend on a supply of ivory for their livelihoods  Hunting elephants is no longer legal in many African countries, but poaching was widespread until very recently. For many the high price of ivory, about $100 a pound in the 1980s, was too tempting to resist. Local people often had few other ways to make a living, and subsistence farmers or herders could make more by selling the tusks of one elephant than they could make in a dozen years of farming or herding. As the price of ivory soared, poachers became more organized, using automatic weapons, motorized vehicles, and airplanes to chase and kill thousands of elephants. To governments and revolutionaries mired in civil wars and strapped for cash, poaching ivory became a way to pay for more firearms and supplies. Poaching has caused the collapse of elephants’ social structure as well as decimating their numbers. Poachers target the biggest elephants because their tusks are larger. They often kill all the adults in the group, leaving young elephants without any adults to teach them migration routes, dry-season water sources, and other learned behavior. Many of Africa’s remaining elephant groups are leaderless subadults and juveniles.
4. The word “trophies” in the third paragraph can be best replaced by ____

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In the 1930s, a lot of people in the USA were out of work. Among these people was a man named Alfred Butts. He always had an interest in word games and so, to fill his time, he planned a game which he called “Lexico”. However, he was not completely satisfied with the game, so he made a number of changes to it and, in time, changed its name from “Lexico” to “Alph” and then to “Criss Cross”. He wanted to make some money from his new game but he didn’t have any real commercial success. In 1939, Butts happened to meet a man called Jim Brunot who showed an interest in the new game. The two men worked together on developing the game and in 1948 it was offered for sale in the United States under its new name - “Scrabble”. At first, it didn’t sell very well. In the first year it sold just 2,250 sets and by 1951 it had only reached 8,500 sets a year. Then, in 1952 the manager of Macy’s department store in New York, Jack Strauss, happened to play “Scrabble” while he was on holiday. He thought it was a wonderful game and, when he went back to work after his holiday, he insisted that Macy’s should stock the game and make an effort to call the public’s attention to it. As a result, “Scrabble” became a big success in the United States and it soon spread to Australia and then to other English-speaking countries
4. When did Alfred Butts first put his game on the market?

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It was at this time, 1876–1877, that a new invention called the telephone emerged. It is not easy to determine who the inventor was. Both Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray submitted independent patent applications concerning telephones to the patent office in Washington on February 14, 1876. Bell, in Boston at the time, was represented by his lawyers and had no idea that the application had been submitted. Gray’s application arrived at the patent office a few hours before Bell’s, but Bell’s lawyers insisted on paying the application fee immediately; as a result, the heavily burdened office registered Bell’s application first. Bell’s patent was approved and officially registered on March 7, and three days later the famous call is said to have been made when Bell’s summons to his assistant confirmed that the invention worked. Alexander Graham Bell, one year younger than Lars Magnus Ericsson, had been born in Edinburgh. Bell’s interest in telephony came through his mother, who was deaf, and his father, Alexander Melville Bell, who was a teacher of elocution, famous for the phonetic transcription system he had developed to help the deaf learn to speak. The Bell family migrated to Canada in 1870; two years later Alexander Melville Bell was offered a teaching post at a school for the deaf in Boston in the United States, but he successfully recommended his son for the post instead. Father and son were at this time working together to try to discover whether sound could be made visible for the deaf with the help of telegraphy.  But many others had already been pursuing the idea of telephony for years. A resolution of the US House of Representatives in June 2002 claimed that Bell had nefariously acquired and exploited an apparatus, the “teletrophono”, invented by Antonio Meucci long before Bell and Gray. One damaging piece of evidence for Bell was that Meucci’s material had disappeared without trace from the very laboratory at which Bell was carrying out his experiments. In the 1880s, proceedings initiated by the American government charged Bell with “fraudulent and dishonest conduct” and claimed that his patent should be revoked. These proceeding were discontinued after Meucci’s death in 1889 and the expiry of Bell’s patent in 1893. A later investigation, published by A. Edward Evenson in 2000, claims that Bell’s attorneys acquired technical details from Gray’s attorneys that are said to have been added to Bell’s patent after it had been submitted. The whole saga has elements reminiscent of a thriller. One salient fact was that Bell saw no need to take out patents for the telephone in the Nordic countries. This meant that anyone anywhere there was free to manufacture and sell telephones. Bell presented the telephone before a large audience for the first time at the World Exhibition in Philadelphia in June 1876. In the audience was the physicist William Thomson, who in August that year presented Bell’s telephone to the British Association in Glasgow. In Sweden, on September 30 that year, Dagens Nyheter became the first newspaper to refer to “the speaking telegraph”, an apparatus that “plainly and clearly conveyed the words uttered at one end of the telegraph line to the other”. The first version of Bell’s telephone, as it was described in the patent application, was not suitable for practical purposes. Only after “a relatively thorough reconstruction”, to quote Hemming Johansson, could a telephone be designed for large-scale production. The Bell Telephone Company began operating on July 11, 1877. In the same month, the first useable Bell telephone arrived in Europe to be presented in Plymouth to the British Association by the chief engineer of the General Post Office, William H. Preece, in the presence of Bell himself  
2. According to paragraph 1, Bell’s application was registered first because _____

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We ought have come to the ballet. It was exciting.

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When he came, I watched a football match on TV.

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It's a nice day. Does anyone fancy ____ for a walk?

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Traditional Thai cuisine falls into different categories: boiled dishes, salads, pounds foods and curries. Whether at home or in a restaurant. Thai meals are always (1)________ ‘family style’ – that is, from common serving platters, with the plates appearing in whatever order the kitchen can prepare them. When serving yourself from a common platter, put no more than one spoonful (2) _______ your plate at a time. Heaping your pate with all ‘your’ portions at once will look greedy to Thais unfamiliar with Western conventions. Another important factor in a Thai meal is (3) _______ a balance of flavours and textures. Traditionally the party orders a curry, a steamed or fried fish, a stir-fried vegetable dish and a soup, taking great care to (4) _____ cool and hot, sour and sweet, salty and plain. Thai food was originally eaten with the fingers, and it still is in certain regions. These days, though, fork-and-spoon dining is the norm. To use these tools the Thai way, use a serving spoon, or alternatively your own, to take a (5) ________ mouthful of food from a central dish and ladle it over a portion of your rice. The fork is then used to push the nowfood-soaked portion of rice back onto the spoon before entering the mouth

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He invited me to join his trip , but I ______ down his invitation.