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:
As working women continue to receive better and better wages, housewives still work at home without receiving pay – checks. Should a woman who works at home, doing the housework and caring for children, be paid for her service? In a 1986 study at Cornell University, sociologists found that the value of the services of a housewife averaged $ 11,600 a year. This rate was based on a family composed of a husband, wife, and three young children. The $ 11,600 is what the husband would have to pay if he hired others to take over his wife’s household chores. The researchers concluded that it would be fair for husbands to pay wives according to federal guidelines for minimum wages.
Another plan for rewarding women who work at home has been suggested by a former Secretary of Health and Human Services. He says that full-time housewives should be allowed to pay social security taxes, with their employers contributing part of the payment. He feels that the present system is unfair. He said, “ If you stay at home and raise a family, nobody will give you credit for it.”

What is the main purpose of this passage ?

Read the passage, and choose the correct answer A, B, C or D for each question.

A Tale of Two Cities: Seoul and Dhaka

The city of Seoul, with a population of 10.3 million on 1998, forms part of South Korea’s capital region. As the capital city, Seoul has been at the center of South Korea’s remarkable economic transformation over the last four decades.

In the 1960s, much of South Korea’s industrial growth was focused on greater Seoul, which by 1970 had 52 percent of the country’s industrial workers. The major contributor to this growth was rural-urban migration, which accounted for 50 percent of the country’s urban increase in the 1960s. This very rapid growth of Seoul’s population placed pressure on the city’s infrastructure, leading to marked growth in new settlements, increasing  traffic congestion, and growing air pollution. This led the government to adopt a national decentralization strategy in the 1970s that attempted to divert industry to other areas of the country. In the 1980s, continuing efforts were made to decentralize economic activity.

Dhaka’s population of 6.5 million is crowded into 360 square kilometers, creating one of the highest urban densities in the world. Unlike South Korea, Bangladesh has not experienced rapid economic change, and agriculture remains the major component of GDP and the main resource of employment. While general economic conditions have improved somewhat over the last twenty years, Bangladesh is still a very poor country.

Dhaka’s rate of population growth has declined slightly over the past three decades, but it still remains among the highest in Asia (4.2 percent annually). The continuing growth reflects ongoing migration from rural areas to the Dhaka urban region. Recently, the city’s population has also grown as a result of the expansion of its administrative boundaries, a process that added 1 million people to the city in the 1980s. Dhaka’s growth has not been associated with an expansion of productive employment opportunities in relatively high wage areas. Instead, there has been growing employment in the low productivity, low-income sector, such as petty retailing or rickshaw driving.

All of the following are the problems that the authorities of Seoul had to deal with

EXCEPT____________.

She intended to quit her job to stay ____ home and look ___ her sick mother.

(319)________

Read the passage below carefully, and then choose the best answer:
The Power of Crowdsourcing
There is a famous old saying that when trying to solve a problem “two heads are better than one”. Yet until recently, businesses would often rely on one key person to get important tasks done. But thanks to a phenomenon called crowdsourcing, more and more companies are allowing their consumers to have their say when designing new products. The term “crowdsourcing” refers to the process of outsourcing jobs which were once done by a single person to a large group (or a crowd) of people. In the past, crowdsourcing wasn’t practical, as it was impossible to gather thousands of like-minded people together to share opinions. Now, thanks to the Internet, online forums, and social media, this isn’t a difficult task at all. There are many important applications for crowdsourcing in business. For example, if a small business was looking to develop a business logo, it might employ a single designer and hope for the best. However, with crowdsourcing, companies can specify some guidelines about their project, set a budget, and start a design contest online. Within hours, it will likely receive hundreds of designers sending them logos. In the end, they can choose the design they like best and the winner will get compensated. Crowdsourcing has other applications as well. A website called Duolingo is using crowdsourcing to translate documents into different languages. It offers free lessons to language learners. As part of their tests, users translate lines to test their knowledge. Then, a computer programme will analyze thousands of test results for consistency and arrange an accurate translation. Not everyone is sold on crowdsourcing, though. In many cases, it may be better to rely on the opinion of a few specialized professionals than information from a crowd. For instance, it makes more sense to trust the opinion of one top doctor than to take the advice of 1,000 random people regarding a health issue. Another criticism is the low wage that crowdworkers usually receive. Since crowdworkers are freelancers and not employees, they can be paid less than minimum wage. Whether you love or hate crowdsourcing, it appears to be here to stay. So before you make any financial judgements, consider following the crowd and give crowdsourcing a try.
5. The word “it” in paragraph 3 refers to __________.

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Ocean Currents and the Turning of the Tide
If you take a seat at the beach and look out across the water, you’ll soon notice that oceans have a rhythm of their own. Throughout the course of the day, sea levels will rise and fall, and water will flow through routes and end up in different places. But how does it all work? One force at play is tides, which are the alternating water levels of the ocean. There are two major gravitational forces which cause tides: the sun and the moon. The moon’s force has a tugging effect on oceans which causes them to bulge outwards on opposite sides of the planet. Solar tides operate according to the same principles. However, they are only about 50 percent as strong due to the distance between the sun and the earth. As tides rise and fall, they create tidal currents. The strongest tidal currents occur at the height of both high and low tides. Unlike other currents, they do not flow in a continuous stream. Far from shore, tidal currents don’t have much of an effect. Yet when they pass through narrow area, like harbours and bays, tidal currents can displace plants, animals, and sediment. Although they may certainly shake things up, not all of the damage is negative. Tidal currents can spread fish eggs across long distances to assist fertilization, in addition to transporting key nutrients. Another category of currents is ocean currents. These currents occur near the top of the water, and are mainly powered by the wind. One example of these is coastal currents, which are those beachgoers encounter when going for a swim. One of the strongest and most well-known currents is the Gulf Stream, which brings warm water from the Gulf of Mexico all the way to Western Europe. Meanwhile, Deep Ocean currents are a powerful force in the depths of oceans. The strongest of these has been nicknamed the global conveyor belt, and it moves much slower than surface currents. Although we can’t see it in operation, it’s about 16 times as powerful as all the earth’s rivers put together. As the global conveyor belt pushes water around the planet, it carries nutrition and carbon dioxide to places that truly need them. In the end, although there are several currents working on oceans simultaneously, they each seem to perform a necessary function that creates balance for life in the sea.
5. What can be inferred from the passage?

 If I get this report finished I will knock _____ early and go to the pub for some drink.

(470)________

Read the following passage and choose the best answer (A, B, C, D):
However objective we believe ourselves to be, most of us do not judge a product solely on its merits, considering quality, value and style before making a decision. (1)______, we are easily influenced by the people around us. There is nothing wrong with this. It is probably a smarter way to make decisions than (2)_________  on only our own opinions. But it does make life hard for companies. They have long understood that groups of friends and relatives tend to buy the same products, but understanding the reasons has been tricky. It is because they are so similar with (3)________to how much money they make and what television ads they watch that they independently arrive at the same decision? Or do they copy one another, perhaps (4)_________ envy or perhaps because they have shared information about the products? Research in Finland recently found overwhelming evidence that neighbours have a big influence on buying decisions. When one of a person’s ten nearest neighbours bought a car, the chances that that person would buy a car of the same brand during the next week and a half (5)_____ by 86 per cent. The researchers argued that it was not just a matter of envy. Used cars seemed to attract neighbours even more than new cars. This suggested that people were not trying to keep up with their neighbours, they were keen to learn from them. Since used cars are less reliable, a recommendation of one can strongly influence a buying decision

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The County Council has decided to give a  higher (1)______ to cycling and agreed a new strategy to guide the way ahead in East Sussex.Cycling is a (2)____ , healthy and environmentally friendly form of transport. It is (3)_______- to make it safer, more convenient, and to increase the proportion of journeys made by bicycle.Cycling is being encouraged both for utility purposes (such as journeys to work, school and the shops) and for recreation trips for exercise and enjoyment, including longer trips by tour. Recent cycle schemes carried out in conjunction with District Councils and other bodies (4) ____   the Brighton and Hove seafront route and the Cross Levels Way cycle route, in Eastbourne.Local people will be consulted as the strategy is implemented. The County council will work with local cycling and other groups, and a countrywide Cycling Forum will be formed to (5) _______ that all bodies concerned with cycling are in regular (6) ________  . The (7) ______ of the Cycling strategy are given in a leaflet, and a copy of the full strategy document can be seen in County Council Public Libraries.

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 :
Faster processors and advances in memory technology have made today’s smartphones much more powerful than a lot of computers from just a decade ago. With wireless technology, people can surf the internet, play online games, send e-mail, and do (1)_________ all the things they once could only do on a computer. (2)__________, they have the power to do things constantly at their fingertips. Many people (3)_________ that while smartphones are powerful tools, they are making people reliant on them. Why would a person need to learn to read a map when he can get directions to anywhere by simply asking his phone a question? Who needs to learn maths when you have immense calculating power in your pocket at all times? What (4)__________ is there to memorise facts about history, art, or geography when that information is readily available from a portable Internet interface? There are just some of the questions being asked and answered as smartphone usage continues to spread. Like any technology, smartphones have their advantages, but they do have disadvantages as well that we must (5)__________ an eye on.

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 :
If you are like most students, you probably started this new academic year with a resolution to study harder. Now, science can you help you keep your resolution. Recent discoveries in brain research (1) _______ to better ways to learn. How does the brain (2) _______ new information? Think of the last time someone told you their phone number. Could you remember that number five minutes later? Probably not! That’s because it was in your short-term memory. Our memory actually has three components. Sensory memory takes (3) _______  information from our five senses and is stored for just a few seconds while our brain processes it. Short-term memory works like a “holding area” for new information – that’s where you keep the phone number while you dial it. but if you can put the phone number into long-term memory, you’ll remember that same phone number next week. This part of your memory (4) _______ everything from irregular verbs to the names of all your cousins. When you study, you transfer new information into long-term memory. Every time we learn something new, the structure of the brain actually changes as we build new connections to information that we (5) _______ know. When there are more connections to the new information, it’s easier to find it again

Read the passage below carefully, and then choose the best answer:
The LED Lighting Revolution
If you have picked up any electronics magazines recently, you have probably heard about LEDs; yet chances are, you probably don’t realize why they are so special. The truth is that these tiny light bulbs are helping to improve watches, remote controls, televisions, and a host of other projects. Diodes are components that enable energy to flow in one direction, while simultaneously blocking the current from the opposite direction. This is similar to how a valve works on a faucet. If electronic manufacturers require currents to flow in several directions, then multiple diodes will be included in the circuit design. With LEDs, every time a current passes through them, a light is emitted. LED is short for light-emitting diode. Although they have only recently waves in the past decade or so, early models have been around since 1962. There are several benefits that LEDs offer when compared to incandescent or fluorescent lighting. For starters, they have extremely long-life spans in the range of l00,000 hours even in the toughest conditions. They also require far less energy than power sources, which can save users money over the long run. Since LEDs don’t contain moving parts like other bulbs, they can withstand heavy impacts without getting damaged. Finally, they don’t require any _warm-up time_ so they instantly light up when switched on. The only drawback is that they are still a more expensive to purchase at the moment. LEDs were first used on digital clocks, but they have come a long way since then. They have certainly done a lot to improve TV technology. LED TVs have been a hit because they can be built extremely thin, yet also offer power-saving benefits. LED TVs also provide a wider range of colour, which allows for more lifelike and vivid images. In the future, organic LEDs, or OLEDs, will bring additional benefits for viewers. OLEDs are even more flexible than LEDs, so manufacturers will be able to create bent display screens and lights. Therefore, you will be able to roll up your living room TV set and pack it in your suitcase. In other words, LED and OLED technology will likely be lighting up your life for years to come.
1. When energy goes through an LED, it _________

Thomas has often boasted ______ his son’s golfing ability.

(485)______

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Although he created the game of basketball at the YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts, Dr. James A. Naismith was a Canadian. Working as a physical education instructor at the International YMCA, now Springfield College, Dr. Naismith noticed a lack of interest in exercise among students during the wintertime. The New England winters were fierce, and the students balked at participating in outdoor activities. Naismith determined that a fast-moving game that could be played indoors would fill a void after the baseball and football seasons had ended. First he attempted to adapt outdoor games such as soccer and rugby to indoor play, but he soon found them unsuitable for confined areas. Finally, he determined that he would have to invent a game. In December of 1891, Dr. Naismith hung two old peach baskets as either end of the gymnasium at the school, and, using a soccer ball and nine players on each side, organized the first basketball game. The early rules allowed three points for each basket and made running with the ball a violation. Every time a goal was made, someone had to climb a ladder to retrieve the ball. Nevertheless, the game became popular. In less than a year, basketball was being played in both the United States and Canada. Five years later, a championship tournament was staged in New York City, which was won by the Brooklyn Central YMCA. The teams had already been reduced to seven players, and five became standard in the 1897 season. When basketball was introduced as a demonstration sport in the 1904 Olympic Games in St. Louis, it quickly spread throughout the world. In 1906, a metal hoop was used for the first time to replace the basket, but the name basketball has remained.
10. It can be inferred from the passage that the original baskets: 

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 usually does NOT vary in a Capsicum plant? 

Robert said that his father _____ to Dallas the year before.

(229)_____

Find mistakes:
For thousands of years, man has created sweet-smelling substances from wood, herbs and flowers and using them for perfumes or medicine.

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The Most Convenient Way to Shop
Do you do a lot of online shopping? For millions of people, it is a wonderful way to purchase the things they want without having to leave their homes. Online shopping is not very old. The first online shopping company was created in 1991. However, the idea of shopping from home has existed for a very long time. Many years ago, people shopped with mail-order catalogues. A catalogue is a very thin magazine that is full of advertisements, and then they mailed their order back to the company. A few weeks later, their product arrived. Because people ordered their products through the mail, they were called “mail-order” catalogues. After that, shopping television shows became popular. These TV shows introduced products to people watching at home. People who wanted to buy something called the company and placed the order. This is called home shopping. Now we have online shopping. Online shoppers go online and look at web sites. When they find something they want, they place an order with the web site. They usually pay with a credit card or with virtual currency. Online shopping is changing shopping. Millions of people buy things online every day. The biggest effect of online shopping is on stores. As more people buy things online, more stores are shutting down. After all, why should you go to a store if you can buy things from home? The main advantage of online shopping is convenience. You can buy almost anything from anywhere in the world, and a week later the product will be in your house. Also, other customers write reviews of products. You can read these reviews and decide whether or not you want to buy the product. The big disadvantages are the loss of jobs from store closing, and the fact that you can’t examine an item closely before you buy it. After online shopping, what do you think will come next?
7. What can you see in “_reviews_” mentioned in paragraph 5?

She got the job ______ she actually had very little experience.
(158)_______

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

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

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

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Television has transformed politics in the United States by changing the way in which information is disseminated, by altering political campaigns, and by changing citizen's patterns of response to politics. By giving citizens independent access to the candidates, television diminished the role of the political party in the selection of the major party candidates. By centering politics on the person of the candidates, television accelerated the citizen's focus on character rather than issues. Television has altered the forms of political communication as well. The messages on which most of US reply are briefer than they once were. The stump speech, a political speech given by travelling politicians and lasting 1/2 to 2 hours, which characterized nineteenth-century political discourse, has given way to the 30-second advertisement and the 10 second "sound bite" in broadcast news. Increasingly the audience for speeches is not that standing in front of the politician but rather the viewing audience tvho will hear and see a snippet of the speech on the news. In these abbreviated forms, much of what constituted the traditional political discourse of earlier ages has been lost. In 15 or 30 seconds, a peaker cannot establish the historical context that shaped the issue in question, cannot detail the probable causes of the problem, and cannot examine alternative proposals to argue that one is preferable to others. In snippets, politicians assert but do not argue. Because television is an intimate medium, speaking through it require a changed political style that was more conversational, personal, and visual than that of the old-style stump speech. Reliance on television means that increasingly our political world contains memorable pictures rather than memorable words. Schools teach US to analyze words and print. However, in a word in which politics is increasingly visual, informed citizenship requires a new set of skills. Recognizing the power of television's pictures, politicians craft televisual, staged events, called pseudo-event, designed to attract media coverage. Much of the political activity we see on television news has been crafted by politicians, their speechwriters, and their public relations advisers for televised consumption. Sound bites in news and answers to questions in debates increasingly sound like advertisements.
7. The word "that" in paragraph 2 refers to: 

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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 word “thereby” in line 18 is closet in meaning to     .