The “chasing cheese” race this year is becoming a farce. Many people decide not to participate.

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.

    Humans generally spent more time working than do other creatures, but there is greater variability in industriousness from one human culture to the next than is seen in subgroups of any other species. For instance, the average French worker toils for 1,646 hours a year; the average American for 1,957 hours; and the average Japanese for 2,088.

    One reason for human diligence is that people, unlike animals, can often override the impulses they may feel to slow down. They can drink coffee when they might prefer a nap or flick on the air-conditioning when the heat might otherwise demand torpor. Many humans are driven to work hard by a singular desire to gather resources far beyond what is required for survival. Squirrels may collect what they need to make it through one winter but only humans worry about collect bills, retirement, or replacing their old record albums with compact discs.

    Among other primates, if you don't need to travel around to get food for that day, you sit down and relax, said Dr.Frans de Waal of Emory University in Atlarita. "it's typically human to try to accumulate wealth and get more and more.”

     Much of the acquisitiveness is likely to be the result of cultural training. Anthropologists have found that most hunter-gatherer groups, who live day to day on the resources they can kill or forage and who stash very little away for the future generally work only three to five hours daily.

     Indeed, an inborn temptation to reduce may lurk beneath even the most work-obsessed people, which could explain why sloth ranks with lust and gluttony as one of the seven deadly sins.

What is the main idea of this reading?

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.

     What picture do you have of the future? Will life in the future be better, worse or the same as now? What do you hope about the future?

      Futurologists predict that life will probably be very different in 2050 in all the fields, from entertainment to technology. First of all, it seems that TV channels will have disappeared. Instead, people will choose a program from a 'menu' and a computer will send the program directly to the television.

Today, we can use the World Wide Web to read newspaper stories and see pictures on a computer thousands of kilometers away. By 2050, music, films, programs, newspapers and books will come to us by computer.

      In what concerns the environment, water will have become one of our most serious problems. In many places, agriculture is changing and farmers are growing fruit and vegetables to export.  This uses a lot of water. Demand for water will increase ten times between now and 2050 and there could be serious shortages. Some futurologists predict that water could be the cause of war if we don't act now.

      In transport, cars running on new, clean fuels will have computers to control the speed and there won't be any accidents. Today, many cars have computers that tell drivers exactly where they are. By 2050, the computer will control the car and drive it to your destination. On the other hand, space planes will take people halfway around the world in two hours. Nowadays, the United States Shuttle can go into space and land on Earth again. By 2050, space planes will fly all over the world and people will fly from Los Angeles to Tokyo in just two hours.

      In the domain of technology, robots will have replaced people in factories. Many factories already use robots. Big companies prefer robots - they do not ask for pay rises or go on strike, and they work 24 hours a day. By 2050, we will see robots everywhere - in factories, schools, offices, hospitals, shops and homes.

       Last but not least, medicine technology will have conquered many diseases. Today, there are electronic devices that connect directly to the brain to help people hear. By 2050, we will be able to help blind and deaf people see and hear again. Scientists have discovered how to control genes. They have already produced clones of animals. By 2050, scientists will be able to produce clones of people and decide how they look, how they behave and how much intelligence they have.

The passage mainly discusses ______________.

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct word or phrase that best fits each of the numbered blanks.

     Cats of all kinds are present in the legends, religion, mythology, and history of many different cultures. Cave paintings created by early humans display different types of wild cats (26) _______ are now extinct, or no longer around. Many of these great beasts saw humans as food, but were hunted by humans in return. Cats (27) ________ to the ones kept as pets today started showing up in artwork thousands of years ago. For example, the ancient Egyptians believed cats were the sacred, or special, animal of a goddess named Bast. They believed that Bast often appeared as a cat, so many ancient Egyptians respected and honoured cats and kittens. (28) ________, other cultures feared cats or thought that they brought illnesses and bad luck. Today, with millions kept as pets in homes around the world, cats have become important members of (29) _______ families. No one knows for sure when or how cats became very popular household pets. It's possible that people noticed how cats hunted mice and rats, so they set food and milk out to keep the cats near their homes. This helped to prevent too many of these rodents from coming into homes and eating people's food or (30) _________ sickness.