Few companies are flourishing during difficult times.

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 36 to 42.

By the turn of the century, the middle-class home in North American had been transformed. "The flow of industry has passed and left idle the loom in the attic, the soap kettle in the shed". Ellen Richards wrote in 1908. The urban middle class was now able to buy a wide array of food products and clothing - baked goods, canned goods, suits, shirts, shoes, and dresses. Not only had household production waned, but technological improvements were rapidly changing the rest of domestic work. Middle-class homes had indoor running water and furnaces, run on oil, coal, or gas, that produced hot water. Stoves were fueled by gas, and delivery services provided ice for refrigerators. Electric power was available for lamps, sewing machines, irons, and even vacuum cleaners. No domestic task was unaffected. Commercial laundries, for instance, had been doing the wash for urban families for decades; by the early 1900's the first electric washing machines were on the market.

One impact of the new household technology was to draw sharp dividing lines between women of different classes and regions. Technological advances always affected the homes of the wealthy first, filtering downward into the urban middle class. But women who lived on farms were not yet affected by household improvements. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, rural homes lacked running water and electric power. Farm women had to haul large quantities of water into the house from wells or pumps for every purpose. Doing the family laundry, in large vats heated over stoves, continued to be a full day’s work, just as canning and preserving continued to be seasonal necessities. Heat was provided by wood or coal stoves. In addition, rural women continued to produce most of their families' clothing. The urban poor, similarly, reaped few benefits from household improvements. Urban slums such as Chicago's nineteenth ward often had no sewers, garbage collection, or gas or electric lines; and tenements lacked both running water and central heating. At the turn of the century, variations in the nature of women's domestic work were probably more marked than at anytime before

What is the main topic of the passage?

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

David broke his leg and couldn't play in the final.

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 31 to 35.

Thousands of books have been written on the conflict between parents and teenagers. Psychologists and sociologists have spent years trying to understand the reasons for the tension and endless arguments between these two groups.

A close look at these arguments often reveals that the reasons are so trivial that we may wonder what the tears and shouts have all been about. Most arguments are not about major issues like the nuclear bomb or the ecological problems of the universe. The fights are usually about simple matters such as food, clothes, the weekly allowance or the telephone.

Let's take an ordinary day and examine what happens. Problems start around 7 a.m. It is then that parents expect their children to get up, get dressed, eat and go to school. Parents and alarm clocks seem like the enemies of mankind at that early hour. Some parents even expect the "poor" youngsters to tidy up their room and put everything in its place before leaving for school - a ridiculous demand - in the eyes of the "victims". In the afternoon, parents want them to do homework and study hard. They resent their children's endless conversations on the phone. In the evening, they complain about the clothes and jewelry the teenagers wear and preach for hours about the dangers on the road and the need to be home by midnight at the latest, like Cinderella.

Youngsters expect parents to be more flexible; not to preach and lecture but to advise and explain. They would like them to be tolerant of different views, listen to their problems and respect their privacy. However, even if they don't admit it, youngsters need the guidance and support of their parents, their approval or disapproval and even their firm opposition on crucial subjects such as drugs or alcohol. They need limits. They need loving but firm authority. In short, youngsters should be more patient and sensitive to their parents' feelings and parents must understand that they cannot prevent their children from making mistakes. Trial and error is, after all, a very important part of the process of growing up.

Most arguments between parents and teenagers are about_____________.