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

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

(32) _____

Read the following passage and choose among A, B, C or D the correct answer to each of the questions.

FIRST TIME IN THE AIR

When John Mills was going to fly in an aero plane for the first time, he was frightened.

He did not like the idea of being thousands of feet up in the air. "I also didn't like the fact that I wouldn't be in control," says John.

"I'm a terrible passenger in the car. When somebody else is driving, I tell them what to so. It drives everybody crazy."

However John couldn't avoid flying any longer. It was the only way he could visit his grandchildren in Canada.

"I had made up my mind that I was going to do it, I couldn't let my son, his wife and their three children travel all the way here to visit me. It would be so expensive for them and I know Tom's business isn't doing so well at the moment - it would also be tiring for the children - it's a nine-hour flight!" he says.

To get ready for the flight John did lots of reading about aero planes. When he booked his seat, he was told that he would be flying on a Boeing 747, which is better known as a jumbo jet. "I needed to know as much as possible before getting in that plane. I suppose it was a way of making myself feel better. The Boeing 747 is the largest passenger aircraft in the world at the moment. The first one flew on February 9th 1969 in the USA. It can carry up to 524 passengers and 3.400 pieces of luggage. The fuel for aero planes is kept in the wings and the 747 is wings are so big that they can carry enough fuel for an average car to be able to travel 16,000 kilometers a year for 70 years. Isn't that unbelievable? Even though I had discovered all this very interesting information about the jumbo, when I saw it for the first time, just before I was going to travel to Canada, I still couldn't believe that something so enormous was going to get up in the air and fly. I was even more impressed when I saw how big it was inside with hundreds of people!"

The biggest surprise of all for John was the flight itself. "The take-off itself was much smoother than I expected although I was still quite scared until we were in the air. In the end, I managed to relax, enjoy the food and watch one of the movies and the view from the window was spectacular. I even managed to sleep for a while! Of course," continues John, "the best reward of all was when I arrived in Canada and saw my son and his family, particularly my beautiful grandchildren. Suddenly, I felt so silly about all the years when I couldn't even think of getting on a plane. I had let my fear of living stop me from seeing the people I love most in the world. I can visit my son and family as often as I like now!"

How did John feel about his fears in the end?

No educational medium better as means of spatial communication than the atlas. Atlases deal with such invaluable information as population distribution and density. One of the best, Pennycooke's World Atlas, has been widely accepted as a standard owing to the quality of its maps and photographs, which not only show various settlements but also portray them in a variety of scales. In fact, the very first map in the atlas is a cleverly designed population cartogram that projects the size of each country if geographical size were proportional to population. Following the proportional layout, a sequence of smaller maps shows the world’s population density, each country’s birth and death rates, population increase or decrease, industrialization, urbanization, gross national product in terms of per capita income, the quality of medical care, literacy, and language. To give readers a perspective on how their own country fits in with the global view, additional projections depict the world's patterns in nutrition, calorie and protein consumption, health care, number of physicians per unit of population, and life expectancy by region. Population density maps on a subcontinental scale, as well as political maps. Convey the diverse demographic phenomena of the world in a broad array of scales.

 It can be inferred from the passage that maps can be used to ...........

Iron production was revolutionized in the early eighteenth century when coke was first used instead of charcoal for refining iron ore. Previously the poor quality of the iron had restricted its use in architecture to items such as chains and tie bars for supporting arches, vaults, and walls. With the improvement in refining ore, it was now possible  to  make  cast-iron beams, columns, and girders. During the nineteenth century further advances were made, notably Bessemer’s process for converting iron into steel, which made the material more commercially viable.
Iron was rapidly adopted for the  construction  of  bridges,  because  its  strength was far greater  than that of stone or timber, but its use in the architecture of buildings developed more slowly. By 1800 a complete internal iron skeleton for buildings had been developed in industrial architecture replacing traditional timber beams, but it generally remained concealed. Apart from its low cost, the appeal of iron as a building material lay in its strength, its resistance to fire, and its potential to span vast areas. As a result, iron became increasingly popular as a structural material for more traditional styles of architecture during the nineteenth century, but it was invariably concealed.
Significantly, the use  of  exposed  iron  occurred  mainly  in  the  new  building types spawned by the Industrial Revolution: in factories, warehouses, commercial offices, exhibition hall, and railroad stations, where its  practical  advantages  far  outweighed  its  lack of status. Designers of the railroad stations of the new age explored the potential of iron, covering huge areas with spans that surpassed the great vaults of medieval churches and cathedrals. Paxton’s Crystal Palace, designed to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, covered an area of 1.848 feet by 408 feet in prefabricated units of glass set in iron frames. The Paris Exhibition of 1889 included both the widest span and the  greatest height achieved so far with the Halle Des Machines, spanning 362 feet, and the Eiffel Tower 1,000 feet high. However, these achievements were mocked by the artistic elite of Paris as expensive and ugly follies. Iron, despite its structural advantages, had little aesthetic status. The use of an exposed iron structure in the more traditional styles of architecture was slower to develop.

Iron replaced stone and timber in the building of bridges because iron was considered ..........

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When another old cave is discovered in the south of France, it is not unusual news. Rather, it is an ordinary event. Such discoveries are so frequent these days that hardly anybody pays heed to them. However, when the Lascaux cave complex was discovered in 1940, the world was amazed. Painted directly on its walls were hundreds of scenes showing how people lived thousands of years ago. The scenes show people hunting animals, such as bison or wild cats. Other images depict birds and, most noticeably, horses, which appear in more than 300 wall images, by far outnumbering all other animals.
Early artists drawing these animals accomplished a monumental and difficult task. They did not limit themselves to the easily accessible walls but carried their painting materials to spaces that required climbing steep walls or crawling into narrow passages in the Lascaux complex.
Unfortunately, the paintings have been exposed to the destructive action of water and temperature changes, which easily wear the images away. Because the Lascaux caves have many entrances, air movement has also damaged the images inside.
Although they are not out in the open air, where natural light would have destroyed them long ago, many of the images have been deteriorated and are barely recognizable. To prevent further damage, the site was closed to tourists in 1963, 23 years after it was discovered.

The phrase “pays heed to” in the passage is closest in meaning to     .

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

A main difference between tsunamis in Japan and in Hawaii is that tsunamis in Japan are more likely to  .............

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Living things include both the visible world of animals, plants, and fungi as well as the invisible world of bacteria and viruses. On a basic level, we can say that life is ordered. Organisms have an enormously complex organization. We're all familiar with the intricate systems of the basic unit of life, the cell. Life can also "work." Living creatures can take in energy from the environment. This energy, in the form of food, is transformed to maintain metabolic processes and for survival. Life grows and develops. This means more than just replicating or getting larger in size. Living organisms also have the ability to rebuild and repair themselves when injured. Life can reproduce. Think about the last time you accidentally stubbed your toe. Almost instantly, you moved back in pain. Finally, life can adapt and respond to the demands placed on it by the environment. There are three basic types of adaptations that can occur in higher organisms.
Reversible changes occur as a response to changes in the environment. Let's say you live near sea level and you travel to a mountainous area. You may begin to experience difficulty breathing and an increase in heart rate as a result of the change in altitude. These symptoms go away when you go back down to sea level. Body-related changes occur as a result of prolonged changes in the environment. Using there previous example, if you were to stay in the mountainous area for a long time, you would notice that your heart rate would begin to slow down and you would begin to breath normally. These changes are also reversible. Genotypic changes (caused by genetic mutation) take place within the genetic makeup of the organism and are not reversible. An example would be the development of resistance to pesticides by insects and spiders.

Which of the following is NOT a feature of life?

The Robots Are Doing the Thinking

Some robots may take care of the dishes, do your laundry, keep the house clean, or even go to the store to do your shopping. Robots that use artificial intelligence are the ones that a lot of people are holding out for. Not only will these robots be able to take care of (1)__________, but they will be able to learn as well.

There are some types of robots that already use a form of artificial intelligence called “swarm intelligence”. As a(n) (2)___________ of how this works, scientists have created underwater robots that will be used to repair coral reefs that have been damaged. What these robots do is work together to rebuild damaged reefs. As they (3)__________, each one knows what has been done in one area of a reef and can help build other areas or build onto something that another robot has done. Working together, the robots create a new reef that can then be (4)__________ to grow and thrive on its own.

Amazon, the major electronic commerce company, has recently come (5)_________ an ingenious idea. Instead of having a package delivered to a customer via delivery truck, Amazon will send out flying drones that will bring a package to a person’s house for delivery almost immediately. 

(1)__________

Being aware of one's own emotions - recognizing and acknowledging feelings as they happen - is at the very heart of Emotional Intelligence. And this awareness encompasses not only moods but also thoughts about those moods. People who are able to monitor their feelings as they arise are less likely to be ruled by them and are thus better able to manage their emotions.
Managing emotions does not mean suppressing them; nor does it mean giving free rein to every feeling. Psychologist Daniel Goleman, one of several authors who have popularized the notion of Emotional Intelligence, insisted that the goal is balance and that every feeling has value and significance. As Goleman said, "A life without passion would be a dull wasteland of neutrality, cut off and isolated from the richness of life itself." Thus, we manage our emotions by expressing them in an appropriate manner. Emotions can also be managed by engaging in activities that cheer us up, soothe our hurts, or reassure us when we feel anxious.
Clearly, awareness and management of emotions are not independent. For instance, you might think that individuals who seem to experience their feelings more intensely than others would be less able to manage them. However, a critical component of awareness of emotions is the ability to assign meaning to them - to know why we are experiencing a particular feeling or mood. Psychologists have found that, among individuals who experience intense emotions, individual differences in the ability to assign meaning to those feelings predict differences in the ability to manage them. In other words, if two individuals are intensely angry, the one who is better able to understand why he or she is angry will also be better able to manage the anger.
Self-motivation refers to strong emotional self-control, which enables a person to get moving and pursue worthy goals, persist at tasks even when frustrated, and resist the temptation to act on impulse. Resisting impulsive behavior is, according to Goleman, "the root of all emotional self- control."
Of all the attributes of Emotional Intelligence, the ability to postpone immediate gratification and to persist in working toward some greater future gain is most closely related to success - whether one is trying to build a business, get a college degree, or even stay on a diet. One researcher examined whether this trait can predict a child's success in school. The study showed that 4-year-old children who can delay instant gratification in order to advance toward some future goal will be "far superior as students" when they graduate from high school than will 4-year-olds who are not able to resist the impulse to satisfy their immediate wishes.

Which of the following can we infer from paragraph 1?

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:
Sir Anthony Van Dyck, one of the world’s greatest masters of portraiture, was born in Antwerp and was the seventh of twelve children. His affluent father apprenticed him to a painter when he was just a little over ten. Having become a member of the Antwerp Guild of painters before he was nineteen, he worked in the studio of Peter Paul Rubens for several years. In Italy, Van Dyck studied the great Venetian masters and painted flattering portraits of gorgeous ladies and haughty nobles in gilded velvet robes with lace and pearls. While he was sought after by the aristocracy for his acclaimed loose brushwork, his engravings and etchings also evinced his outstanding talent. Upon his return to Antwerp in 1628, he was influenced by Rubens’s interpretation of the artistic form and produced numerous religious paintings while holding an appointment as the court painter. During his tenure, he proved that his use of color, his sensitive elegance, and his remarkable insight were unexcelled.
His fame preceded him to England, where he was invited by King Charles I. After years of faithful service, he was knighted in recognition of his achievements in painting countless portraits of the king, the queen, the royal children, and the titled nobility of England.
However, Van Dyck’s greatest piece is one of his religious works, a true masterpiece displayed in the Antwerp gallery. This group scene exhibits his artful polish in painting the folds of fabric, the delicacy of human skin, landscape, and other externals, and puts him above other accomplished contemporary masters. Although Charles paid Van Dyck a salary and granted him a pension, the painter’s extravagant life-style and penchant for luxuries led him into debt, and he died without means.

It can be inferred from the passage that after Van Dyck left Rubens

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct word for each of the blanks.
 In recent years there have been many articles on air pollution in newspapers and magazines. Scientists all over the world have warned that our atmosphere is (1).....more and more contaminated, and that Man, through his carelessness, may run out of pure air to breathe.
Automobiles and industries mainly account (2).... air pollution in most cities. They pour into the air such gases as carbon monoxide, sulfur and nitrogen oxides, (3)...... are very harmful to humans. (4)......still, these gases, a series of chemical changes, turn into toxic acids. They fall down in “acid rains”, raising the acidity in the air, soil and water to dangerous levels and affecting not only tress but also fish and other wildlife. Many industrial countries in Europe and North America have suffered bad effects (5)......those “rains”.
Surely, Man faces no more urgent problem than that of saving his own survival. Scientists, social organizations and governments shout sit down together to solve the air pollution problem.
(5).........................

Choose the best answer: 
By the time we (1)________old age most of us have (2)________twenty years sleeping. Yet nobody knows why we do it. Most scientists believe that by resting our bodies, we allow time for(3) ________ maintenance work to be done. Any (4)________that there is can be put right more quickly if energy isn’t being used up doing other things. Sleep is controlled by certain chemicals. These build up during the day, eventually reaching peaks that cause tiredness. We can control the effects of these chemicals to some extent. Caffeine helps to (5)________ us awake while alcohol and some medicines make us sleepy. By using electrodes, scientists are able to (6)________what goes on in people’s heads while they sleep. They have (7)________that when we first drop off everything slows down. The heart (8)_______more slowly and our breathing becomes shallow.
After about 90 minutes our eyes start to twitch and we go into what is called REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, which is a (9)________that we’ve started to dream .You have dreams every night, even if you don’t remember them. There are many theories
about why we dream, none of them conclusive. A lot of people say they have to have eight hours’ sleep every night while others seem to (10)________on a lot less. One thing’s for sure – we all need some sleep. Going without it can have some very strange effects.

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

Which statement is not true?

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:
Every year about two million people visit Mount Rushmore, were the faces of four U.S presidents were carved in granite by sculptor Gutzon Borglum and his son, the late Lincoln Borglum. The creation of the Mount Rushmore monument Line took 14 years – from 1927 to 1941 – and nearly a million dollars. There were times when money was difficult to come by and many people were jobless. To move more than 400,000 tons of rock, Borglum hired laid-off workers from the closed-down mines in the Black Hills area. He taught these men to dynamite, drill, carve, and finish the granite as they were hanging in midair in his specially devised chairs, which had many safety features. Borglum was proud of the fact that no workers were killed or severely injured during the years of blasting and carving.
During the carving, many changes in original design had to be made to keep the carved heads free of large fissures that were uncovered. However, not all the cracks could be avoided, so Borglum concocted a mixture of granite dust, white lead, and linseed oil to fill them.
Every winter, water from melting snows gets into the fissures and expands as it freezes, making the fissures bigger. Consequently, every autumn maintenance work is done to refill the cracks. The repairers swing out in space over a 500-foot drop and fix the monument with the same mixture that Borglum used to preserve this national monument for future generations.

Borglum’s mixture for filling cracks was     _

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In the United States, friendship can be close, constant, intense, generous and real, yet fade away in a short time if circumstances change. Neither side feels hurt by this. Both may exchange Christmas greetings for a year or two, perhaps a few letters for a while - then no more. If the same two people meet again by chance, even years later, they pick up the friendship where they left off and are delighted.
In the United States, you can feel free to visit people's homes, share their holidays, or enjoy their lives without fear that they are taking on a lasting obligation. Do not hesitate to accept hospitality because you can’t give it in turn. No one will expect you to do so for they know you are far from home. Americans will enjoy welcoming you and be pleased if you accept their hospitality easily.
Once you arrived there, the welcome will be fun, warm, and real. Most visitors find themselves readily invited into many homes there. In some countries it is considered inhospitable to entertain at home, offering what is felt as only home cooked food, not doing something for your guests." It is felt that restaurant entertaining shows more respect and welcome. Or for other different reasons, such as crowded space, language difficulties, or family customs, outsiders are not invited into homes.
In the United States, both methods are used, but it is often considered friendlier to invite a person to one's home than to go to a public place, except in purely business relationship. So, if your host or hostess brings you home, do not feel that you are being shown inferior treatment.
Don't feel neglected if you do not find flowers awaiting you in your hotel room, either. Flowers are very expensive there; hotel delivery is uncertain; arrival times are delayed, changed or cancelled - so flowers are not customarily sent as a welcoming touch. Please do not feel unwanted! Outward signs vary in different lands; the inward welcome is what matters, and this will be real.

In the United States, friendship will    if circumstances change.

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

What did Iwata change about the world of gaming?

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

The word “that” in paragraph 2 refer to     .

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You might be surprised to know that bicycles have existed for less than two hundred years. Though the earliest comes from a sketch said to be from 1534 and attributed to Gian Giacomo, there are several early but unverified claims for the invention of the modem bicycle. No one is sure who invented this popular two- wheeled machine, but it was probably either the German Karl von Drais, in 1817, or the American W K Clarkson, in 1819. The early models didn't look much like the bicycles of today. The front wheel was much bigger than the back one, and also there weren't any pedals - riders had to move themselves forward by pushing their feet against the ground. Pedals finally arrived in the 1840s, and in 1879 an Englishman named Henry Lawson had the idea of connecting them to the back wheel with a chain. Gears, which made things much easier for those cycling uphill, first appeared in the 1890s.
There are now approximately one billion bicycles in the world - more than twice the total number of cars - and they are the main form of transport in some developing countries. They have to compete with cars on the streets of all the world’s cities, and the two forms of transport don't always mix well. In London in 2005, for example, over 300 cyclists were either killed or seriously injured in accidents involving cars. Even though bicycles are much more environmentally friendly than cars, most governments don't do much to encourage people to ride rather than drive. In China, which is famous for having a huge number of bicycles (about 200 million), the authorities in the city of Shanghai even banned cycling for a while in 2003.
Cycling is on the rise is the United Kingdom, and the number of annual journeys made by bike in London has increased 50% over the last five years. Experts say there is a mixture of reasons for this boom: concerns about the environment, the desire to keep fit, and also the fact that cycling is often not only cheaper but also quicker than travelling by car.
However, although one in three British adults owns a bicycle, they still don't use them nearly as much as they could. Bikes are used for a mere 2% of journeys in the UK, while the figure for the Netherlands is an impressive 27%.
Cycling is becoming more popular as a competitive sport, and the most famous race is of course the three-week Tour de France, which takes place every July. American Lance Armstrong won it every year from 1999 to 2005 - one of the greatest individual sporting achievements of all time.

Why didn't early bicycles look much like today's models?

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We live in a world of tired, sleep deprived people. In his book Counting Sheep, Paul Martin - a behavioural biologist - describes a society which is just too busy to sleep and which does not givesleeping the importance it deserves.
Modern society has invented reasons not to sleep. We are now a 24/7 society where shops and services must be available all hours. We spend longer hours at work than we used to, and more time getting to work. Mobile phones and email allow us to stay in touch round the clock and late-night TV and the Internet tempt us away from our beds. When we need more time for work or pleasure, the easy solution is to sleep less. The average adult sleeps only 6.2 hours a night during the week, whereas research shows that most people need eight or even eight and a half hours' sleep to feel at their best.
Nowadays, many people have got used to sleeping less than they need and they live in an almost permanent state of 'sleep debt'.
Until the invention of the electric light in 1879 our daily cycle of sleep used to depend on the hours of daylight. People would get up with the sun and go to bed at nightfall. But nowadays our hours of sleep are mainly determined by our working hours (or our social life) and most people are woken up artificially by an alarm clock. During the day caffeine, the world's most popular drug, helps to keep us awake. 75% of the world's population habitually consume caffeine, whichup to a point masks the symptoms of sleep deprivation.
What does a chronic lack of sleep do to us? As well as making us irritable and unhappy as humans, it also reduces our motivation and ability to work. This has serious implications for society in general.
Doctors, for example, are often chronically sleep deprived, especially when they are on 'night call', and may get less than three hours' sleep. Lack of sleep can seriously impair their mood, judgment, and ability to take decisions. Tired engineers, in the early hours of the morning, made a series of mistakes with catastrophicresults. On our roads and motorways lack of sleep kills thousands of people every year. Tests show that a tired driver can be just as dangerous as a drunken driver. However, driving when drunk is against the law but driving when exhausted isn't. As Paul Martin says, it is very ironic that we admire people who function on very little sleep instead of criticizing them for being irresponsible. Our world would be a much safer, happier place if everyone, whatever their job, slept eight hours a night.

All of the following are mentioned as those whose performance is affected by 'sleep debt' EXCEPT     .

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions:
On the tiny island of Flores, east of Bali and midway between Asia and Australia, the scientists have discovered the remains of a small, hobbit-like species of humans. These people grew no larger than the modern three-year-old child. They lived about 18,000 years ago and are completely different species of human.
This discovery has taught scientists a lot about the human species. This remarkable discovery shows that the human species is more varied and flexible in its ability to adapt than previously thought. These hobbit-like people join a short list of other type of humans that lived with modern humans.
The researchers believe that these hobbits evolved from a normal size, human population that reached Flores around 840,000 years ago. One likely explanation is that, over thousands of years, the species became smaller because the environmental conditions favored a smaller body size. The dwarfing of mammals on islands occurs frequently. Islands limit food supply and predators and species compete for the same environmental space. Survival would depend on minimizing energy requirements.

What makes this discovery so significant?