Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 43 to 50.

The need for a surgical operation, especially an emergency operation, almost always comes as a severe shock to the patient and his family. Despite modern advances, most people still have an irrational fear of hospitals, and anaesthetics. Patients do not often believe they really need surgery - cutting into a part of the body as opposed to treatment with drugs.

In the early years of the 20th century there was little specialization in surgery. A good surgeon was capable of performing almost every operation that had been advised up to that time. Today the situation is different. Operations are now being carried out that were not even dreamed of fifty years ago. The heart can be safely opened and its valves repaired. Clogged blood vessels can be cleaned out, and broken ones mended or replaced. A lung, the whole stomach, or even part of the brain can be removed and still permit the patient to live comfortable and satisfactory life. However, not every surgeon wants to, or is qualified to carry out every type of modern operation.

The scope of surgery has increased remarkably in the past decades. Its safety has increased too. Deaths from most operations are about 20% of what they were in 1910 and surgery has been extended in many directions, for example to certain types of birth defects in new born babies, and, at the other end of the scale, to life saving operations for the octogenarian. The hospital stay after surgery has been shortened to as little as a week for most major operations. Most patients are out of bed on the day after an operation and may be back at work in two or three weeks.

Many developments in modern surgery are almost incredible. They include replacement of damaged blood vessels with simulated ones made of plastic: the replacement of heart valves with plastic substitutes; the transplanting of tissues such as lens of the eye; the invention of the artificial kidney to clean the blood of poisons at regular intervals and the development of heart and lung machines to keep patients alive during very long operations. All these things open a hopeful vista for the future of surgery.

One of the most revolutionary areas of modem surgery is that of organ transplants. Until a few decades ago, no person, except an identical twin, was able to accept into his body the tissues of another person without reacting against them and eventually killing them. Recently, however, it has been discovered that with the use of X-rays and special drugs, it is possible to graft tissues from one person to another which will survive for periods of a year or more. Kidneys have been successfully transplanted between non-identical twins. Heart and lung transplants have also been reasonably successful.

"Spare parts" surgery, the simple routine replacement of all worn-out organs by new ones, is

still a dream of the future but surgery is ready for such miracles. In the meantime, you can be happy if your doctors say to you, "Yes, I think it is possible to operate on you for this condition."

Question 47: Today, compared with 1910 ________.

Markthe letter A, B,C or D to indicate the correct answer to each of the following questions.

Question 16: Could you _______ a moment while I see if Peter is in his office?

Markthe letter A, B,C or D to indicate the correct answer to each of the following questions.

Question 18: Nowadays, most students use _______ calculators in their studies and examinations.

Markthe letter A, B,C or D to indicate the correct answer to each of the following questions.

Question 15: In future, cars will still be _________ us, but, instead of petrol, they will run ________anything from electricity to methane gas.

Mark the letter A, B, C or D to indicate the word or phrase that is OPPOSITE in meaning to the underlined part in each of the following questions.

Question 24: A frightening number of illiterate students are graduating from college.

Markthe letter A, B,C or D to indicate the correct answer to each of the following questions.

Question 19: Lan: "She seems ______ for the job". - Hoa: "Yes. Everybody thinks she's perfectly suited for it."

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C or D to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 36 to 42.

Life originated in the early seas less than a billion years after the Earth was formed. Yet another three billions 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 essential 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 10 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 the 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 sediments below this Silurian- Devonian geological boundary. It turns out that some fossils can be extracted from these sediments by putting the rock 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 discovered fossils have not only revealed the existence ofpreviously unknown organisms, but have also pushed back these dates for the invasion of land by multicellular organisms. Our view about the nature of the early plants and animal communities are now being revised. And with those revisions come new speculations about the first terrestrial life-forms.

Question 36: The word "drastic" is closest in meaning to ________.