Giải bởi Vietjack
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Đáp án: D
2. Thông tin: The traditional view of the first terrestrial organisms is based on megafossils ― relatively large specimens of essentially whole plants and animals.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.
Reading to oneself is a modern activity which was almost unknown to the scholars of the classical and medieval worlds, while during the fifteenth century the term “reading” undoubtedly meant reading aloud. Only during the nineteenth century did silent reading become commonplace.
One should be wary, however, of assuming that silent reading came about simply because reading aloud was a distraction to others. Examinations of factors related to the historical development of silent reading have revealed that it became the usual mode of reading for most adults mainly because the tasks themselves changed in character.
The last century saw a steady gradual increase in literacy and thus in the number of readers. As the number of readers increased, the number of potential listeners declined and thus there was some reduction in the need to read aloud. As reading for the benefit of listeners grew less common, so came the flourishing of reading as a private activity in such public places as libraries, railway carriages and offices, where reading aloud would cause distraction to other readers. Towards the end of the century, there was still considerable argument over whether books should be used for information or treated respectfully and over whether the reading of materials such as newspapers was in some way mentally weakening. Indeed, this argument remains with us still in education. However, whateverits virtues, the old shared literacy culture had gone and was replaced by the printed mass media on the one hand and by books and periodicals for a specialised readership on the other.
By the end of the twentieth century, students were being recommended to adopt attitudes to books and to use reading skills which were inappropriate, if not impossible, for the oral reader. The social, cultural and technological changes in the century had greatly altered what the term “reading” implied.
Reading aloud was more common in the medieval world because ______.
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.
During the teenage years, many young people can at times be difficult to talk to. They often seem to dislike being questioned. They may seem unwilling to talk about their work at school. This is a normal development of this age. Though it can be very hard for parents to understand, it is part of becoming independent of teenagers trying to be adult while they are still growing up. Young people are usually unwilling to talk if they believe that questions are trying to check up on them.
Parents should do their best to talk to their son and daughter about school, work and future plans but should not push them to talk if they don't want to. Parents should also watch for danger signs. Some young people in trying to be adult may experience with sex, drugs, alcohol or smoking. Parents need to watch for any signs of unusual behavior which may be connected with these and help if neccesary.
This passage is taken from a ________________.
In Death Valley, California, one of the hottest, most arid places in North America, there is much salt, and salt can damage rocks impressively. Inhabitants of areas elsewhere, where streets and highways are salted to control ice, are familiar with the resulting rust and deterioration on cars. That attests to the chemically corrosive nature of salt, but it is not the way salt destroys rocks. Salt breaks rocks apart principally by a process called crystal prying and wedging. This happens not by soaking the rocks in salt water, but by moistening their bottoms with salt water. Such conditions exist in many areas along the eastern edge of central Death Valley. There, salty water rises from the groundwater table by capillary action through tiny spaces in sediment until it reaches the surface.
Most stones have capillary passages that suck salt water from the wet ground. Death Valley provides an ultra-dry atmosphere and high daily temperatures, which promote evaporation and the formation of salt crystals along the cracks or other openings within stones. These crystals grow as long as salt water is available. Like tree roots breaking up a sidewalk, the growing crystals exert pressure on the rock and eventually pry the rock apart along planes of weakness, such as banding in metamorphic rocks, bedding in sedimentary rocks, or preexisting or incipient fractions, and along boundaries between individual mineral crystals or grains. Besides crystal growth, the expansion of halite crystals (the same as everyday table salt) by heating and of sulfates and similar salts by hydration can contribute additional stresses. A rock durable enough to have withstood natural condition for a very long time in other areas could probably be shattered into small pieces by salt weathering within a few generations.
The dominant salt in Death Valley is halite, or sodium chloride, but other salts, mostly carbonates and sulfates, also cause prying and wedging, as does ordinary ice. Weathering by a variety of salts, though often subtle, is a worldwide phenomenon. Not restricted to arid regions, intense salt weathering occurs mostly in salt-rich places like the seashore, near the large saline lakes in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica, and in desert sections of Australia, New Zealand, and central Asia.
What is the passage mainly about?
Although the earth was formed about 4,500 million years ago, human beings have inhabited it for less than half a million years. Within this time, population has increased bugely and people have had a vast (1) _______ upon the earth. They have long been able to (2) _______ the forces of nature to use. Now, with modern technology, they have the power to alter the balance of life on earth.
Reports back from the first astronauts helped dispel the dangerous (3) _______ that the world had no boundaries and had militless resources. (4) _______, ecologists have shown that all forms of life on earth are interconnected, so it (5) _______ that all human activity has an effect on the natural environment.
In recent years, people have been putting the environment under stress. As a result, certain (6) _______ materias such as timber, water and minerals are beginning to (7) _______ short. Pollution and the (8) _______ of waste are already critical issues, and the (9) _______ of the environment is fast becoming the most pressing problem (10) _______ us all. The way we respond to the challenge will have a profound effect on the earth and its life support (11) _______
However, despite all these threats there are (12) _______ signs. Over the past few decades, the growth in population has been more than matched by food production, indicating that we should be able to feed ourselves for some time yet.
Read the following passage and then choose the best answer.
Communication in general is process of sending and receiving messages that enables humans to share knowledge, attitudes, and skills. Although we usually identify communication with speech, communication is composed of two dimensions - verbal and nonverbal.
Nonverbal communication has been defined as communication without words. It includes apparent behaviors such as facial expressions, eyes, touching, tone of voice, as well as less obvious messages such as dress, posture and spatial distance between two or more people.
Activity or inactivity, words or silence all have message value: they influence others and these others, in turn, respond to these communications and thus they are communicating.
Commonly, nonverbal communication is learned shortly after birth and practiced and refined throughout a person's lifetime. Children first learn nonverbal expressions by watching and imitating, much as they learn verbal skills.
Young children know far more than they can verbalize and are generally more adept at reading nonverbal cues than adults are because of their limited verbal skills and their recent reliance on the nonverbal to communicate. As children develop verbal skills, nonverbal channels of communication do not cease to exist although become entwined in the total communication process.
According to the writer, …………….
Life originated in the early seas less than a billion years after Earth was formed. Yet another three billion years were to pass before the first plants and animals appeared on the continents. Life's transition from the sea to the land was perhaps as much of an evolutionary challenge as was the genesis of life.
What forms of life were able to make such a drastic change in lifestyle? The traditional view of the first terrestrial organisms is based on megafossils ― relatively large specimens of essentially whole plants and animals. Vascular plants, related to modern seed plants and ferns, left the first comprehensive megafossil record. Because of this, it has been commonly assumed that the sequence of terrestrialization reflected the evolution of modern terrestrial ecosystems. In this view, primitive vascular plants first colonized the margins of continental waters, followed by animals that fed on the plants, and lastly by animals that preyed on the plant-eaters. Moreover, the megafossils suggest that terrestrial life appeared and diversified explosively near the boundary between the Silurian and the Devonian periods, a little more than 400 million years ago.
Recently, however, paleontologists have been taking a closer look at the sediments below this Silurian-Devonian geological boundary. It turns out that some fossils can be extracted from these sediments by putting the rocks in an acid bath. The technique has uncovered new evidence from sediments that were deposited near the shores of the ancient oceans ― plant microfossils and microscopic pieces of small animals. In many instances the specimens are less than one-tenth of a millimeter in diameter. Although they were entombed in the rocks for hundreds of millions of years, many of the fossils consist of the organic remains of the organism.
These newly discovered fossils have not only revealed the existence of previously unknown organisms, but have also pushed back these dates for the invasion of land by multicellular organisms. Our views about the nature of the early plant and animal communities are now being revised. And with those revisions come new speculation about the first terrestrial life-forms.
The word “drastic” in line 5 is closest in meaning to
Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 39 to 46.
Because writing has become so important in our culture, we sometimes think of it as more real than speech. A little thought, however, will show why speech is primary and writing secondary to language. Human beings have been writing (as far as we can tell from surviving evidence) for at least 5000 years; but they have been talking for much longer, doubtless ever since there have been human beings.
When writing did develop, it was derived from and represented speech, although imperfectly. Even today there are spoken languages that have no written form. Furthermore, we all learn to talk well before we learn to write; any human child who is not severely handicapped physically or mentally will learn to talk: a normal human being cannot be prevented from doing so. On the other hand, it takes a special effort to learn to write. In the past many intelligent and useful members of society did not acquire the skill, and even today many who speak languages with writing systems never learn to read or write, while some who learn the rudiments of those skills do so only imperfectly.
To affirm the primacy of speech over writing is not, however, to disparage the latter. One advantage writing has over speech is that it is more permanent and makes possible the records that any civilization must have. Thus, if speaking makes us human, writing makes us civilized.
We sometimes think of writing as more real than speech because ______.
