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 28 to 34.

  The iPhone was released in 2007. E-books reached the mainstream in the late 1990s. Printed books have been around since the 1450s. But how did writing move around before then? After all, a book - electronic or not - is simply a mechanism for making written information portable. And our ancestors were as eager to take their reading on the go as we are. Here are some ways that people used to record information and carry it around.

  In Mesopotamia, in the 3rd millennium BCE, various ancient peoples began scribbling on small tablets that were several inches long. Scribes used a stylus to make marks on wet clay tablets, w hich were then dried outside or baked so as to make them long-lasting. Some particularly important texts ran across multiple tablets. The type of writing used by these scribes was cuneiform, and it sustained the production of these tablets for some 2,000 years.

  The Chinese also created tablets that were made from bamboo or wood and were lashed together with the equivalent of rope. Records suggest that these may have emerged by 1300 BCE, if not before, but many simply rotted away or otherwise decayed. The emperor Shihuangdi also didn’t help in 213 BCE when he ordered that most books not in his possession be burned. During roughly the same time, the Chinese also created scrolls made of silk, though these scrolls were not always rolled into a cylindrical form; some of the documents written on silk that were found, for example, at Mawangdui, an archaeological site in southeastern China that dates to the 2nd century BCE, were found folded into rectangles. The texts on these tablets and scrolls covered a wide range of topics, from medicine to poetry to philosophy.

  Wax tablets were a riff on the ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets, courtesy of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Clay tablets could be awkward to work with; papyrus could be a pain to prepare and store. But filling a wooden block with hot wax that, after it cooled, provided a smooth soft writing surface? Simple. And cheap too. Permanence was a bit of a problem, but it was also an advantage: the wax could be remelted or scraped smooth, and the tablet was ready for use again. The Greeks and the Romans, and medieval Europeans after them, used these tablets for some important legal documentation, but their primary advantage was flexibility—very much like a paper (or electronic) tablet today.

(Source: https://britannicalearn. com)

The word “them" in paragraph 2 refers to _____________

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the word(s) CLOSEST in meaning to the underlined word(s) in each of the following questions.

Suddenly, it began to rain heavily, so all the summer hikers got drenched all over.

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the sentence that best completes each of the following exchanges.

Tim and Alice are tatking about pets.

-Tim: “Oh! What a beautiful cat. What do you think?”

-Alice: “ _____________ . Dogs are more loyal than cats.”

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the following questions.

I think you’d be good at this job. Why don’t you _____________ it?

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the sentence that is closest in meaning to each of the following questions.

People rumor that the president has been suffering from a rare disease.

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 28 to 34.

  The iPhone was released in 2007. E-books reached the mainstream in the late 1990s. Printed books have been around since the 1450s. But how did writing move around before then? After all, a book - electronic or not - is simply a mechanism for making written information portable. And our ancestors were as eager to take their reading on the go as we are. Here are some ways that people used to record information and carry it around.

  In Mesopotamia, in the 3rd millennium BCE, various ancient peoples began scribbling on small tablets that were several inches long. Scribes used a stylus to make marks on wet clay tablets, w hich were then dried outside or baked so as to make them long-lasting. Some particularly important texts ran across multiple tablets. The type of writing used by these scribes was cuneiform, and it sustained the production of these tablets for some 2,000 years.

  The Chinese also created tablets that were made from bamboo or wood and were lashed together with the equivalent of rope. Records suggest that these may have emerged by 1300 BCE, if not before, but many simply rotted away or otherwise decayed. The emperor Shihuangdi also didn’t help in 213 BCE when he ordered that most books not in his possession be burned. During roughly the same time, the Chinese also created scrolls made of silk, though these scrolls were not always rolled into a cylindrical form; some of the documents written on silk that were found, for example, at Mawangdui, an archaeological site in southeastern China that dates to the 2nd century BCE, were found folded into rectangles. The texts on these tablets and scrolls covered a wide range of topics, from medicine to poetry to philosophy.

  Wax tablets were a riff on the ancient Mesopotamian clay tablets, courtesy of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Clay tablets could be awkward to work with; papyrus could be a pain to prepare and store. But filling a wooden block with hot wax that, after it cooled, provided a smooth soft writing surface? Simple. And cheap too. Permanence was a bit of a problem, but it was also an advantage: the wax could be remelted or scraped smooth, and the tablet was ready for use again. The Greeks and the Romans, and medieval Europeans after them, used these tablets for some important legal documentation, but their primary advantage was flexibility—very much like a paper (or electronic) tablet today.

(Source: https://britannicalearn. com)

According paragraph 1, a book is simply defined as _____________ .

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the following questions.

In many families, the most important decisions are _____________ by many women.

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 35 to 42.

  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 surrounded on the west by the Sierra Nevada and on the east 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 organism 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 Britain 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?