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 question.
One of the factors contributing to the intense nature of twenty-first-century stress is our continual exposure to media - particularly to an overabundance of news. If you feel stressed out by the news, you are far from alone. Yet somehow many of us seem unable to prevent ourselves from tuning in to an extreme degree. The further back we go in human history, the longer news took to travel from place to place, and the less news we had of distant people and lands altogether. The printing press obviously changed all that, as did every subsequent development in transportation and telecommunication.
When television came along, it proliferated like a population of rabbits. In 1950, there were 100,000 television sets in North American homes; one year later there were more than a million. Today, it's not unusual for a home to have three or more television sets, each with cable access to perhaps over a hundred channels. News is the subject of many of those channels, and on several of them it runs 24 hours a day. What's more, after the traumatic events of September 11, 2001, live new-casts were paired with perennial text crawls across the bottom of the screen – so that viewers could stay abreast of every story all the time. Needless to say, the news that is reported to us is not good news, but rather disturbing images and sound bytes alluding to disaster (natural and man-made), upheaval, crime, scandal, war, and the like.
Compounding the problem is that when actual breaking news is scarce, most broadcasts fill in with waistline, hairline, or very existence in the future. This variety of story tends to treat with equal alarm a potentially lethal flu outbreak and the bogus claims of a wrinkle cream that overpromises smooth skin. Are humans meant to be able to process so much trauma - not to mention so much overblown anticipation of potential trauma - at once? The human brain, remember, is programmed to slip into alarm mode when danger looms. Danger looms for someone, somewhere at every moment. Exposing ourselves to such input without respite and without perspective cannot be anything other than a source of chronic stress.
According to the passage, which of the following has contributed to the intense nature of twenty first century stress?
A. Our inability to control ourselves
B. An overabundance of special news
D. Our continual exposure to the media
Đáp án đúng: D
Giải thích: Dựa vào thông tin: “One of the factors contributing to the intense nature of twenty-first-century stress is our continual exposure to media”
Dịch: Một trong những yếu tố góp phần vào tính chất dữ dội của căng thẳng thế kỷ XXI là việc chúng ta liên tục tiếp xúc với các phương tiện truyền thông
I thought I saw water in the distance but it must have been an optical ___.
Corn, domesticated by the American Indians, was brought to Europe by Columbus.
Regular exercise and good diet will bring ___ fitness and health.
She was so tired last night that she slept like ___ until 10 o'clock this morning.
"Why don't we wear sunglasses?" - our grandpa would say when we went out on bright sunny days.
He was so mean that he couldn't bear to ___ the smallest sum of money for the charity appeal.
I am sure he did not know that his brother graduated with flying colors.
Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the underlined part that needs correction in each of the following questions.
They asked me what did happen last night, but I was unable to tell them.
Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the most suitable response to complete each of the following exchanges.
- Michel: "I failed my driving test again!" - Nick: “___”