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:
The ocean bottom - a region nearly 2.5 times greater than the total land area of Earth - is a vast frontier that even today is largely unexplored and uncharted. Until about a century ago, the deep-ocean floor was completely inaccessible, hidden beneath waters averaging over 3,600 meters deep. Totally without light and subjected to intense pressures hundreds of times greater than at the Earth's surface, the deep-ocean bottom is a hostile environment to humans, in some ways as forbidding and remote as the void of outer space.
Although researchers have taken samples of deep-ocean rocks and sediments for over a century, the first detailed global investigation of the ocean bottom did not actually start until 1968, with the beginning ofthe National Science Foundation's Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP). Using techniques first developed for the offshore oil and gas industry, the DSDP's drill ship, the Glomar Challenger, was able to maintain a steady position on the ocean's surface and drill in very deep waters, extracting samples of sediments and rock from the ocean floor.
The Glomar Challenger completed 96 voyages in a 15-year research program that ended in November 1983. During this time, the vessel logged 600,000 kilometers and took almost 20,000 core samples of seabed sediments and rocks at 624 drilling sites around the world. The Glomar Challenger's core samples have allowed geologists to reconstruct what the planet looked like hundreds of millions of years ago and to calculate what it will probably look like millions of years in the future. Today, largely on the strength of evidence gathered during the Glomar Challenger's voyages, nearly all earth scientists agree on the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift that explain many of the geological processes that shape the Earth.
The cores of sediment drilled by the Glomar Challenger have also yielded information critical to understanding the world's past climates. Deep-ocean sediments provide a climatic record stretching back hundreds of millions of years, because they are largely isolated from the mechanical erosion and the intense chemical and biological activity that rapidly destroy much land-based evidence of past climates. This record has already provided insights into the patterns and causes of past climatic change - information that may be used to predict future climates.

Which of the following is true of the Glomar Challenger?

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What geologists call the Basin and Range Province in the United States roughly coincides in its northern portions with the geographic province known as the Great Basin. The Great Basin is hemmed in west by the Sierra Nevada and on the east Line by the Rocky Mountains; it has no outlet to the sea. The prevailing winds in the Great Basin are from the west. Warm, moist air from the Pacific Ocean is forced upward as it crosses the Sierra Nevada. At the higher altitudes it cools and the moisture it carries is precipitated as rain or snow on the western slopes of the mountains. That which reaches the Basin is air wrung dry of moisture. What little water falls there as rain or snow, mostly in the winter months, evaporates on the broad, flat desert floors. It is, therefore, an environment in which organisms battle for survival. Along the rare watercourses, cottonwoods and willows eke out a sparse existence. In the upland ranges, pinion pines and junipers struggle to hold their own.
But the Great Basin has not always been so arid. Many of its dry, closed depressions were once filled with water. Owens Valley, Panamint Valley, and Death Valley were once a string of interconnected lakes .The two largest of the ancient lakes of the Great Basin were Lake Lahontan and Lake Bonneville. The Great Salt Lake is all that remains of the latter, and Pyramid Lake is one of the last briny remnants of the former. There seem to have been several periods within the last tens of thousands of years when water accumulated in these basins. The rise and fall of the lakes were undoubtedly linked to the advances and retreats of the great ice sheets that covered much of the northern part of the North American continent during those times.
Climatic changes during the Ice Ages sometimes brought cooler, wetter weather to mid latitude deserts worldwide, including those of the Great Basin. The broken valleys of the Great Basin provided ready receptacles for this moisture.

According to the passage, what does the Great Basin lack?

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The increase in international business and in foreign investment has created a need for executives with knowledge of foreign languages and skills in cross-culture communication. Americans, however, have not been well trained in either area and, consequently, have not enjoyed the same level of success in negotiation in an international arena as have their foreign counterpart.
Negotiating is the process of communicating back and forth for the purpose of reaching an agreement. It involves persuasion and compromise, but in order to participate in either one, the negotiators must understand the ways in which people are persuaded and how compromise is reached within the culture of the negotiation.
In many international business negotiations abroad, Americans are perceived as wealthy and impersonal. It often appears to the foreign negotiator that the American represents a large multimillion- dollar corporation that can afford to pay the price without bargaining further. The American negotiator’s role becomes that of an impersonal purveyor of information and cash, an image that succeeds only in undermining the negotiation.
In studies of American negotiators abroad, several traits have been indentified that may serve to confirm this stereotypical perception, while subverting the negotiator's position. Two traits in particular that cause cross-culture misunderstanding are directness and impatience on the part of American negotiator. Furthermore, American negotiators often insist on realizing short-term goals. Foreign negotiators, on the other hand, may value the relationship established between negotiators and may be willing to invest time in it for long-term benefits. In order to solidify the relationship, they may opt for indirect interactions without regard for the time involved in getting to know the other negotiator.
Clearly, perceptions and differences in values affect the outcomes of negotiations and the success of negotiators. For Americans to play a more effective role in international business negotiations, they must put forth more effort to improve cross-cultural understanding.

What is the author’s main point?

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.

The word “displaced” is closet in meaning to ............

The attraction of gold is as old as history. Since ancient times, gold has been the object of dreams and obsessions. Western literature is full of characters who kill for gold or hoard it, from King Midas in the ancient Greek myths, to Fagin in Dickens' Oliver Twist. These characters go to evil extremes to get or keep their gold and they get the punishment they deserve. Most people would not be willing to go to such extremes, of course, but they would not question the assumption that gold has lasting value above and beyond any local currency. Societies change over time, customs and currencies evolve, but gold remains. A wedding ring, for example, must be gold, and so should any serious gift of jewelry. In fact, giving and wearing gold is still a mark of prestige in our post-industrial society, though gold is no longer valued as it used to be thousands of years ago.
Why is gold so valuable? True, it is shiny, durable, and rare, but it is far less useful than many other minerals or metals. It is also not like stock in a company, where the value of the stock depends on the performance of the company. Gold, on the contrary, like any currency, is valuable precisely because people believe it is valuable. That is, if people were willing to accept seashells for their labor and could use them to pay for food, fuel, and other commodities, then seashells would become a valuable currency. Thus, the value of gold depends on the collective belief that gold will continue to be valuable. As long as demand for gold remains steady, the price will hold steady; if demand is high, it will continue to increase in value. But if people should someday lose faith in gold, the price of gold could fall sharply.
Another factor that has affected the price of gold has been the increasing difficulty in acquiring it. Today, most of the gold left in the grounds is in microscopic pieces mixed with rock. To get it, miners must dig up tons and tons of rock, and then spray it with chemicals to separate out the gold. For one ounce of gold - a wedding ring, for example - the mine processes about 30 tons of rock. This is already a costly operation. But there are also hidden social and environmental costs. The mining and processing of gold is ruinous to the environment and to the health of people living nearby. Most of these mines are in poor regions where the people have had little voice in whether there should be mines and how the mines should be run. The large multinational mining companies simply bought the land and opened the mines. However, as people and governments begin to realize the extent of the damage caused by the mines, the situation might change.
Indeed, if the mining companies ever have to pay the full environmental and social costs of mining gold, the price of gold is likely to climb yet higher.

According to the passage, what is people’s behavior towards gold?

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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.

Which of the following is FALSE?

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct word or phrase that best fits each of the numbered blanks.
Nearly 200 of the 1500 native plant species in Hawaii are at risk of going extinct in the near future because they have been (1)........  to such low numbers. Approximately 90 percent of Hawaii's plants are   found nowhere else in the world but they are (2)........ by alien invasive species such as feral goats, pigs, rodents and non-native plants.
The Hawaii Rare Plant Restoration Group is striving to (3)........ the extinction of the 182 rare  Hawaiian plants with fewer than 50 individuals remaining in the wild. Since 1990, (4).......  a result of     their "Plant Extinction Prevention Program", sixteen species have been brought into cultivation and three species have been reintroduced. Invasive weeds have been removed in key areas and fencing put up in order to protect plants in the wild.
In the future, the Hawaii Rare Plant Restoration Program aims at collecting genetic material from the remaining plants in the wild for storage as a safety net for the future. They also aim to manage wild populations and where possible reintroduce species into (5 )........ .
(5)................................

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:
Scientists have experimented with a new procedure for alleviating the damage caused by strokes. Strokes are frequently caused by a blood clot lodging in the tree of arteries in the head, choking the flow of blood. Some brain cells die as a direct result of the stroke, but others also die over several hours because the proteins spilling out of the first cells that die trigger a chemical chain reaction that kills the neighboring cells.
The current method of reducing the amount of damage is to give a clot dissolver, known as TPA, as soon as possible. But generally TPA is not given to the patient until he or she reaches the hospital, and it still does not immediately stop the damage.
The new technology, still in the research stage, involves chilling the area or the entire patient. It is already known that when an organ is cooled, damage is slowed. This is why sometimes a person who has fallen into an icy pond is not significantly harmed after being warmed up again. The biggest issue is the method of cooling. It is not feasible to chill the head alone. Doctors have chilled the entire body by wrapping the patient in cold materials, but extreme shivering was a problem.
The new idea is to cool the patient from the inside out. Several companies are studying the use of cold-tipped catheters, inserted into the artery in the groin and threaded up to the inferior vena cava, which is a large vein that supplies blood to the abdomen. The catheter is expected to cool the blood that flows over it, thus allowing cooler blood to reach the area of the stroke damage.
It is not expected that the cooling will be substantial, but even a slight decrease in temperature is thought to be helpful. In effect, the patient is given a kind of forced hypothermia. And doctors believe it is important to keep the patient awake so that they can converse with the patient in order to ascertain mental condition.
Studies continue to determine the most effective and least damaging means of cooling the patient in order to reduce this damage.

What is the passage mainly about?

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Have you ever wondered what it would be like to get your dream job? It can take years to get the education and develop the skills you need for the perfect job. However, there is a way to experience your dream job without having to get the required training or degree. Since 2004, Brian Kurth’s company, Vocation Vacations, has been connecting people with mentors who have the jobs of their dreams.
Kurth had been working for a phone company before starting his own company. He didn’t like his job, and he had a long time to think about it on his drive to and from work. He also thought about his dream job while driving. He was interested in becoming a dog trainer, but he didn’t want to take any chances and switch to a field he didn’t have experience in. He really wanted to know what the job was like and if it was realistic for him to work towards his goal. So, he found a mentor – a dog trainer that could tell him about the job and everything it involved. After that, he helped his friends find mentors to explore jobs they were interested in. They thought it was helpful to talk to people who had their dream jobs before spending lots of time and money getting the training they needed for those jobs.
Kurth saw how much this helped his friends, so he decided to turn it into his business. He started Vocation Vacations in 2004, and by 2005, the company was offering experience with over 200 dream jobs. Today, about 300 mentors work with the company to share their knowledge about their jobs. Customers pay to experience the job of their dreams and work with these mentors to see what a job is really like. A “job vacation” costs between $350 and $3,000 and can be for one to three days. Many people use Vocation Vacations to see if their dream job is a career path they want to continue. Others do it just to experience the job of their dreams one time.
Vocation Vacations jobs are in the fields of fashion, food, entertainment, sports and animals. Many people want to try glamorous jobs. For example, they want to try working as actors, music producers, photographers and fashion designers. According to Kurth, some other popular dream jobs are working as bakers, hotel managers and wedding planners.

The word “their” in paragraph 3 refers to     .

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions:
    The increase in urbanization causes different problems. Air and water pollution are amongst the major issue we have to tackle.
    In the first place, cars, factories and burning waste emit dangerous gases that change the air quality in our cities and pose threats to our health. Dangerous gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides cause respiratory diseases, for instant, bronchitis and asthma. Those are also proved to have long-term effects on the environment.
    Furthermore, with the increased population, it becomes difficult to manage the waste generated in cities. Most of the waste is discharged or dumped into rivers or onto streets. The waste pollutes water and makes it unfit for human consumption. Subsequently, it becomes more and more difficult for city dwellers to get clean water. Some cities in Africa are unable to provide adequate water supply because most of the water is lost in pipe leakages. In fact, most city dwellers in developing countries are forced to boil their water or to buy bottled water, which is very expensive. 
    There are several actions that could be taken to eradicate the problems described above. Firstly, a simple solution would be joining community efforts to address problems affecting your city. Ask your parents, friends and relatives to join in as well. These efforts might include clean-up campaigns, recycling projects and a signature campaign to ask the government to do something about the situation. A second measure would be encouraging your teacher to talk about these problems and to discuss how young people can help to solve them. Finally, writing to local organizations working on these issues for ideas on how you can contribute to solve them.

The word those in paragraph 2 refers to ____.

Since the dawn of time, people have found ways to communicate with one another. Smoke signals and tribal drums were some of the earliest forms of communication. Letters, carried by birds or by humans on foot or on horseback, made it possible for people to communicate larger amounts of information between two places. The telegram and telephone set the stage for more modern means of communication. With the invention of the cellular phone, communication itself has become mobile.
For you, a cell phone is probably just a device that you and your friends use to keep in touch with family and friends, take pictures, play games, or send text message. The definition of a cell phone is more specific: it is a hand- held wireless communication device that sends and receives signals by way of small special areas called cells.
Walkie - talkies, telephones and cell phones are duplex communication devices: They make it possible for two people to talk to each other. Cell phones and walkie- talkies are different from regular phones because they can be used in many different locations. A walkie- talkie is sometimes called a half- duplex communication device because only one person can talk at a time. A cell phone is a full- duplex device because it uses both frequencies at the same time. A walkie-talkie has only one channel. A cell phone has more than a thousand channels. A walkie- talkie can transmit and receive signals across a distance of about a mile. A cell phone can transmit and receive signals over hundreds of miles. In 1973, an electronic company called Motorola hired Martin Cooper to work on wireless communication. Motorola and Bell Laboratories (now AT& T) were in a race to invent the first portable communication device.
Martin Cooper won the race and became the inventor of the cell phone. On April 3, 1973, Cooper made the first cell phone call to his opponent at AT& T while walking down the streets of New York city. People on the sidewalks gazed at cooper in amazement. Cooper's phone was called A Motorola Dyna- Tac. It weighed a whopping 2.5 pounds (as compared to today's cell phones that weigh as little as 3 or 4 ounces)
After the invention of his cell phone, Cooper began thinking of ways to make the cell phone available to the general public. After a decade, Motorola introduced the first cell phone for commercial use. The early cell phone and its service were both expensive. The cell phone itself cost about $ 3, 500. In 1977, AT & T constructed a cell phone system and tried it out in Chicago with over 2, 000 customers. In 1981, a second cellular phone system was started in the Washington,D.C and Baltimore area. It took nearly 37 years for cell phones to become available for general public use. Today, there are more than sixty million cell phone customers with cell phones producing over thirty billion dollars per years.

The word "duplex" is closest meaning to ............

Read the passage and choose the best answers:

Never say anything negative about past experiences, employers, or courses or professors. Always think of something positive about an experience and talk about that. You should also be __(1)__. If you are genuinely interested __(2)__ the job, let the interviewer know that.

One of the best ways to show you are keen on a job is to demonstrate that you have researched the organization prior to the interview. You can also __(3)__ interest by asking questions about the job, the organization, and its service and products. The best way to impress an employer is to ask questions that build your interview discussion. This shows you are interested and __(4)__ close attention to the interviewer. It is a good idea to prepare a few questions in advance, but an insightful comment based on your conversation can make an even stronger statement. At the __(5)__ of the interview, it is appropriate for you to ask when you may expect to hear from the employer.

__(2)__

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:
The ocean bottom - a region nearly 2.5 times greater than the total land area of the Earth - is a vast frontier that even today is largely unexplored and uncharted. Until about a century ago, the deep ocean floor was completely inaccessible, hidden beneath waters averaging over 3,600 meters deep. Totally without light and subjected to intense pressures hundreds of times greater than at the Earth's surface, the deep-ocean bottom is a hostile environment to humans, in some ways as forbidding and remote as the void of outer space.
Although researchers have taken samples of deep-ocean rocks and sediments for over a century, the first detailed global investigation of the ocean bottom did not actually start until 1968, with the beginning of the National Science Foundation's Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP). Using techniques first developed for the offshore oil and gas industry, the DSDP's drill ship, the Glomar Challenger, was able to maintain a steady position on the ocean's surface and drill in very deep waters, extracting samples of sediments and rock from the ocean floor.
The Glomar Challenger completed 96 voyages in a 15-year research program that ended in November 1983. During this time, the vessel logged 600,000 kilometers and took almost 20,000 core samples of seabed sediments and rocks at 624 drilling sites around the world. The Glomar Challenger's core samples have allowed geologists to reconstruct what the planet looked like hundreds of millions of years ago and to calculate what it will probably look like millions of years in the future. Today, largely on the strength of evidence gathered during the Glomar Challenger's voyages, nearly all earth scientists agree on the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift that explain many of the geological processes that shape the Earth.
The cores of sediment drilled by the Glomar Challenger have also yielded information critical to understanding the world's past climates. Deep-ocean sediments provide a climatic record stretching back hundreds of millions of years, because they are largely isolated from the mechanical erosion and the intense chemical and biological activity that rapidly destroy much land-based evidence of past climates. This record has already provided insights into the patterns and causes of past climatic change - information that may be used to predict future climates.

The word "inaccessible" in the first paragraph is closest in meaning to     .

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Theresa May, the second female Britain’s prime minister following Margaret Thatcher, revealed in 2013 that she had been given a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes, a condition that requires daily insulin injections. Asked later how she felt about the diagnosis, she said her approach to it was the same as toward everything in her life: “Just get on and deal with it.” That kind of steeliness brought her to center stage in the aftermath of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and the feuding that erupted in the Conservative Party over who would succeed David Cameron.
Ms” May, 59 years old, is the country’s longest-serving home secretary in half a century, with a reputation for seriousness, hard work and above all, determination. She is one of a growing number of women in traditionally male-dominated British politics rising to the upper position of leadership.
Bom in 1956, Ms. May grew up mainly in Oxford shire, an only child who was first drawn to the Conservative Party at age 12. As a conscientious student, she never rebelled against her religious upbringing and remains a regular churchgoer. Tellingly, her sports hero was Geoffrey Boycott, a solid, stubborn cricketer who specialized in playing the long game.
Like many other Britain’s prime minister including Tony Blair, Sir Robert Peel and Margaret Thatcher, she won a place at Oxford. But while almost every other political leader got there by way of Eton College and joined Oxford’s hedonistic Bullingdon Club, she attended a state secondary school and had a more sedate university career. After unsuccessful attempts to be elected to the House of Commons in 1992 and 1994, she finally became an MP in 1997 general election.
May is known for a love of fashion and in particular distinctive shoes. She even wore leopard-print shoes to her final Cabinet meeting as Home Secretary in early 2016. However, she has been quite critical of the media focusing on her fashion instead of her achievement as a politician. May also describes cooking and walking as primary hobbies, and if someone is raising questions about why walking can be classified as a hobby, she elaborates in a column for Balance magazine, in which she wrote of her battle with diabetes.

Which of the following statements is NOT true?

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

"Before the 1960s, Singapore was essential a trading nation. Since (1)….. , it has developed a more (2)…. economy and has become an important financial, trade, and transportation center. Singapore has (3)….. banks, insurance, and finance companies, as (4) …..  as a stock exchange. Tourism is also important to the (5)…. of Singapore.
 There is (6)…. unemployment in Singapore. The country’s annual income per capita (per person) is one of the (7) …. in Asia. The government of Singapore plays a major role in the country’s economy. For example, it (8)….. what benefits, such as vacation time and sick leave, must be (9)….for workers by employers. It also operates an employment agency to help people find jobs, and it provides (10)…..  for retired workers."

4 , as (4) …..  as a stock exchange.

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

There has been much debate over the past few decades concerning fears that nation will

lead to robots replacing human workers on a massive scale.

The increasing use of robotics, computers and artificial intelligence is a reality, but its full

implications are far from cut and dried. Some forecasts present the future in a utopian way,

claiming that robots will take over the tedious heavy work thus freeing up human time and

potential, allowing for more creativity and innovation,  the other end of spectrum are those who

foresee an employment apocalypse, predicting that almost fifty percent of all American jobs

could vanish within the next few decades. Former Microsoft chairman Bill Gates states that in 20

years robots could be in place in a number of job categories, particularly those at lower end of

the scale in terms of skills. The bottom line is that while the future is always uncertain, robots are a fixture of our society, which is not going to disappear. As with the Industrial Revolution, where machines were utilized in many tasks in place of manual laborers and social upheaval followed, the Digital Revolution is likely to place robots in various jobs. In spite of that, many of today's jobs were not in existence before the Industrial Revolution, such as those of programmers, engineers and data scientists. This leads other experts to criticize this alarmist approach of robot scare-mongering, which is invariably compared to the 19th -century "Luddites". This group was textile workers who feared being displaced by machines and resorted to violence, burning down factories and destroying industrial equipment - their rejection of inevitable progress has come to symbolize mindless ignorance.

Needless to say, exactly what new kinds of jobs might exist in the future is difficult to envision at present. Therefore, the crux of the issue is not whether jobs will be lost, but whether the creation of new vacancies will outpace the ever-increasing number of losses and what skills will be required in the future.

It is clearly not all doom and gloom, as demand for employees with skills in data analysis, coding, computer science, artificial intelligence and human-machine interface is rising and will continue to do so. Furthermore, the demand for skills in Jobs where humans surpass computers, such as those involving care, creativity and innovative craftmanship, are likely to increase considerably. Ultimately, the key lies in the adaptation of the workforces, through appropriate education and training, to keep pace with our world's technological progress.

What is the main idea of this article?

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In the late 1960’s, many people in North America turned their attention to environmental problems and new steel-and-glass skyscrapers were widely criticized. Ecologists pointed out that a cluster of tall buildings in a city often overburdens public transportation and parking lot capacities.
Skyscrapers are also lavish consumers, and waster, of electric power. In one recent year, the addition of 17 million square feet of skyscraper office space in New York City raised the peak daily demand for electricity by 120,-000 kilowatts- enough to supply the entire city of Albany, New York, for a day.
Glass-walled skyscrapers can be especially wasteful. The heat loss (or gain) through a wall of half-inch plate glass is more than ten times that through a typical masonry wall filled with insulation board. To lessen the strain on heating and air- conditioning equipment, builders of skyscrapers have begun to use double glazed panels of glass, and reflective glasses coated with silver or gold mirror films that reduce glare as well as heat gain. However, mirror-walled skyscrapers raise the temperature of the surrounding air and affect neighboring buildings.
Skyscrapers put a severe strain on a city’s sanitation facilities, too. If fully occupied, the two World Trade Center towers in New York City would alone generate 2.25 million gallons of raw sewage each year-as much as a city the size of Stamford, Connecticut, which has a population of more than 109,000.
Skyscrapers also interfere with television reception, block bird flyways, and obstruct air traffic. In Boston, in the late 1960’s some people even feared that shadows from skyscrapers would kill the grass on Boston Common.
Still, people continue to build skyscrapers for all the reasons that they have always built them – personal ambition, civic pride, and the desire of owners to have the largest possible amount of rentable space.

According to the passage, all of the following are mentioned as reasons for building skyscrapers EXCEPT

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Loneliness is a curious thing. Most of us can remember feeling most lonely when we were not in fact alone at all, but when we were surrounded by people. Everyone has experienced, at some time, that utter sense of isolation that comes over you when you are at a party, in a room full of happy laughing people, or in an audience at a theatre or a lecture. It suddenly seems to you as if everybody knows everybody else, everybody is sure of himself, everybody knows what is going on; everybody, that is, except you. This feeling of loneliness which can overcome you when are in a crowd is very difficult to get rid of. People living alone - divorced, widowed or single people - are advised to tackle their loneliness by joining a club or society, by going out and meeting people. Does this really help? And what do you do if you are already surrounded by people? There are no easy solutions. Your first day at work, or at a new school or university, is a typical situation in which you are likely to feel lonely. You feel lonely because you feel left out of things. You feel that everybody else is full of confidence and knows what to do, but you are adrift and helpless. The fact of the matter is that, in order to survive, we all put on a show of self-confidence to hide our uncertainties and doubts. So it is wrong to assume that you are alone. In a big city it is particularly easy to get the feeling that everybody except you is leading a full, rich, busy life. Everybody is going somewhere, and you tend to assume that they are going somewhere nice and interesting, where they can find life and fulfilment. You are also going somewhere, and there is no reason at all to believe that your destination is any less, or, for that matter, any more exciting than the next man's. The trouble is that you may not be able to hide the fact that you are lonely, and the miserable look on your face might well put people off. After all, if you are at a party you are not likely to try to strike up a conversation with a person who has a gloomy expression on his face and his lips turned down at the comers. So trying to look reasonably cheerful is a good starting point in combating loneliness, even if you are choking inside. The next thing to avoid is finding yourself in a group where in fact you are a stranger, that is, in the sort of group where all the other people already know each other. There is a natural tendency for people to stick together, to form 'cliques'. You will do yourself no good by trying to establish yourself in a group which has so far managed to do very well without you. Groups generally resent intrusion, not because they dislike you personally, but because they have already had to work quite hard to turn the group into the functioning unit. To include you means having to go over a lot of ground again, so that you can learn their language, as it was, and get involved in their conversation at their level. Of course if you can offer something the group needs, such as expert information, you can get in quickly. In fact the surest way of getting to know others is to have an interest in common with them. There is no guarantee that you will then like each other, but at least part of your life will be taken up with sharing experiences with others. It is much better than always feeling alone. If all this seems to be a rather pessimistic view of life, you have to accept the fact that we are all alone when it comes down to it. When the most loving couple in the world kiss and say goodnight, as soon as the husband falls asleep, the wife realizes that she is alone, that her partner is as far away as if he were on another planet. But it is no cause for despair: there is always tomorrow.

The word “fulfilment” in the passage is closest meaning to.....................

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Political and economic reforms launched in 1986 have transformed the country from one of the poorest in the world, with per capita income around US $100, to lower middle income status within a quarter of a century with per capita income of around US $2,100 by the end of 2015.
Vietnam’s per capita GDP growth since 1990 has been among the fastest in the world, averaging 5.5 percent a year since 1990, and 6.4 percent per year in the 2000s. Vietnam’s economy continued to strengthen in 2015, with estimated GDP growth rate of 6.7 percent for the whole year.
The Vietnamese population is also better educated and has a higher life expectancy than most countries with a similar per capita income. The maternal mortality ratio has dropped below the upper-middle- income country average, while under-five mortality rate has fallen by half, to a rate slightly above that average. Access to basic infrastructure has also improved substantially. Electricity is now available to almost all households, up from less than half in 1993. Access to clean water and modem sanitation has risen from less than 50 percent of all households to more than 75 percent.
Vietnam’s Socio-Economic Development Strategy (SEDS) 2011-2020 gives attention to structural reforms, environmental sustainability, social equity, and emerging issues of macroeconomic stability. It defines three "breakthrough areas": promoting human resources/skills development (particularly skills for modem industry and innovation), improving market institutions, and infrastructure development.
In addition, the five-year Socio-Economic Development Plan 2011-2015 focused on three critical restructuring areas - the banking sector, state-owned enterprises and public investment - that are needed to achieve these objectives. The recent draft of the SEDP 2016-2020 acknowledges the slow progress of the reform priorities of the SEDP 2011-2015.
With agriculture still accounting for almost half the labour force, and with significantly lower labour productivity than in the industry and services sectors, future gains from structural transformation could be substantial. The transformation from state to private ownership of the economy is even less advanced. The state also wields too much influence in allocating land and capital, giving rise to heavy economy wide inefficiencies. So, adjusting the role of the state to support a competitive private sector-led market economy remains a major opportunity. This will be important for enhancing productivity growth which has been stagnating for a long time.

It  took Vietnam about     years to move from the poorest to the middle income status?

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The New York Times is a daily newspaper published in New York city. For a long time, it has been the newspaper of record in the United States and one of the world’s great newspapers. Its strength is in its editorial excellence; it has never been the largest newspaper in terms of circulation.
The Times was established in 1851 as a penny paper whose editors wanted to report the news in a
restrained and objective fashion. It enjoyed early success as its editors set a pattern for the future by appealing to a cultured, intellectual readership instead of a mass audience. However, in the late nineteenth century, it came into competition with more popular, colorful, if not lurid, newspapers in New York City. Despite price increases, the Times was losing $1,000 a week when Adolph Simon Ochs bought it in 1896. Ochs built the Times into an internationally respected daily. He hired Carr Van Anda as editor. Van  Anda placed greater stress than ever on full reporting of the news of the day, and his reporters maintained and emphasized existing good coverage of international news. The management of the paper decided to eliminate fiction from the paper, added a Sunday magazine section, and reduced the paper’s price back to a penny. In April 1912, the paper took many risks to report every aspect of the sinking of the Titanic. This greatly enhanced its prestige, and in its coverage of two world wars, the Times continued to enhance its
reputation for excellence in world news.
In 1971, the Times was given a copy of the so–called “Pentagon Papers,” a secret government study of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. When it published the report, it became involved in several awsuits. The U.S. Supreme Court found that the publication was protected by the freedom–of–thepress clause in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Later in the 1970s, the paper, under Adolph Ochs’s grandson, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, introduced sweeping changes in the organization of the newspaper and its staff and brought out a national edition transmitted by satellite to regional printing plants.

To improve its circulation, the management of the Times did all of the following EXCEPT_.

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It is often the case with folktales that they develop from actual happenings but in their development lose much of their factual base; the story of Pocahontas quite possibly fits into this category of folktale. This princess of the Powhatan tribe was firmly established in the lore of early America and has been made even more famous by the Disney film based on the folktale that arose from her life. She was a real-life person, but the actual story of her life most probably different considerably from the folktale and the movie based on the folktale. Powhatan, the chief of a confederacy of tribes in Virginia, had several daughters, none of whom was actually named Pocahontas. The nickname means “playful one,” and several of Powhatan’s daughters were called Pocahontas. The daughter of Powhatan who became the subject of the folktale was named Matoaka. What has been verified about Matoaka, or Pocahontas as she has come to be known, is that she did marry an Englishman and that she did spend time in England before she died there at a young age. In the spring of 1613, a young Pocahontas was captured by the English and taken into Jamestown. There she was treated with courtesy as the daughter of chief Powhatan. While Pocahontas was at Jamestown, English gentlemen John Rolfe fell in love with her and asked her to marry. Both the governor of the Jamestown colony and Pocahontas’s father Powhatan approved the marriage as a means of securing peace between Powhatan’s tribe and the English at Jamestown. In 1616, Pocahontas accompanied her new husband to England, where she was royally received. Shortly before her planned return to Virginia in 1617, she contracted an illness and died rather suddenly.
A major part of the folktale of Pocahontas that is unverified concerns her love for English Captain John Smith is the period of time before her capture by the British and her rescue of him from almost certain death. Captain John Smith was indeed at the colony of Jamestown and was acquainted with Powhatan and his daughters, he even described meeting them in 1612 journal. However, the story of his rescue by the young maiden did not appear in his writing until 1624, well after Pocahontas had aroused widespread interest in England by her marriage to an English gentlemen and her visit to England. It is the discrepancy in dates that has caused some historians to doubt the veracity of the tale. However, other historians do argue quite persuasively that this incident did truly take place.

What is true about the name Pocahontas, according to the passage?