Bài tập đọc hiểu (Có đáp án) (Đề 1)

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.

We get great pleasure from reading. The more advanced a man is, the greater delight he will find in reading. The ordinary man may think that subjects like philosophy or science are very difficult and that if philosophers and scientists read these subjects, it is not for pleasure.

But this is not true. The mathematician finds the same pleasure in his mathematics as the school boy in an adventure story. For both, it is a play of the imagination, a mental recreation and exercise. The pleasure derived from this activity is common to all kinds of reading. But different types of books give us different types of pleasure. First in order of popularity is novel-reading. Novels contain pictures of imaginary people in imaginary situations, and give us an opportunity of escaping into a new world very much like our world and yet different from it. Here we seem to live a new life, and the experience of this new life gives us a thrill of pleasure. Next in order of popularity are travel books, biographies and memoirs. These tell us tales of places we have not seen and of great men in whom we are interested.

Some of these books are as wonderful as novels, and they have an added value that they are true. Such books give us knowledge, and we also find immense pleasure in knowing details of lands we have not seen and of great men we have only heard of. Reading is one of the greatest enjoyments of life. To book-lovers, nothing is more fascinating than a favorite book. And, the ordinary educated man who is interested and absorbed in his daily occupation wants to occasionally escape from his drudgery into the wonderland of books for recreation and refreshment.

(Source: http://www.importantindia.com)

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Successful students often do the followings while studying. First, they have an overview before reading. Next, they look for important information and pay greater attention to it (which often needs jumping forward or backward to process information). They also relate important points to one another. Also, they activate and use their prior knowledge. When they realize that their understanding is not good, they do not wait to change strategies. Last, they can monitor understanding and take action to correct or “fix up” mistakes in comprehension.

Conversely, students with low academic achievement often demonstrate ineffective study skills. They tend to assume a passive role, in learning and rely on others (e.g., teachers, parents) to monitor their studying, for example, low-achieving students often do not monitor their understanding of content; they may not be aware of the purpose of studying; and they show little evidence of looking back, or employing “fix-up” strategies to fix understanding problems. Students who struggle with learning new information seem to be unaware that they must extent effort beyond simply reading the content to understand and remember it.

Children with learning disabilities do not plan and judge the quality of their studying. Their studying may be disorganized. Students with learning problems face challenges with personal organization as well. They often have difficulty keeping track of materials and assignments, following directions, and completing work on time. Unlike good studiers who employ a variety of study skills in a flexible yet purposeful manner, low-achieving students use a restricted range of study skills. They cannot explain why good study strategies are important for learning; and they tend to use the same, often ineffective study approach for all learning tasks, ignoring task content, structure or difficulty.

(Source: Adapted from Study Skills: Managing Your Learning — NUI Galway)

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Living things include both the visible world of animals, plants, and fungi as well as the invisible world of bacteria and viruses. On a basic level, we can say that life is ordered. Organisms have an enormously complex organization. We're all familiar with the intricate systems of the basic unit of life, the cell. Life can also "work." Living creatures can take in energy from the environment. This energy, in the form of food, is transformed to maintain metabolic processes and for survival. Life grows and develops. This means more than just replicating or getting larger in size. Living organisms also have the ability to rebuild and repair themselves when injured. Life can reproduce. Think about the last time you accidentally stubbed your toe. Almost instantly, you moved back in pain. Finally, life can adapt and respond to the demands placed on it by the environment. There are three basic types of adaptations that can occur in higher organisms.

Reversible changes occur as a response to changes in the environment. Let's say you live near sea level and you travel to a mountainous area. You may begin to experience difficulty breathing and an increase in heart rate as a result of the change in altitude. These symptoms go away when you go back down to sea level.

Body-related changes occur as a result of prolonged changes in the environment. Using ther previous example, if you were to stay in the mountainous area for a long time, you would notice that your heart rate would begin to slow down and you would begin to breath normally. These changes are also reversible. Genotypic changes (caused by genetic mutation) take place within the genetic makeup of the organism and are not reversible. An example would be the development of resistance to pesticides by insects and spiders.

( Source: Adapted from http://biology.about.com/od/apforstudents/a/aa082105a.htm)

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In the American colonies there was little money. England did not supply the colonies with coins and did not allow the colonies to make their own coins, except for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which received permission for a short period in 1652 to make several kinds of silver coins. England wanted to keep money out of America as a means of controlling trade: America was forced to trade only with England if it did not have the money to buy products from other countries. The result during this pre-revolutionary period was that the colonists used various goods in place of money: beaver pelts, Indian wampum, and tobacco leaves were all commonly used substitutes for money. The colonists also made use of any foreign coins they could obtain. Dutch, Spanish, French, and English coins were all in use in the American colonies.

During the Revolutionary War, funds were needed to finance the world, so each of the individual states and the Continental Congress issued paper money. So much of this paper money was printed that by the end of the war, almost no one would accept it. As a result, trade in goods and the use of foreign coins still flourished during this period.

By the time the Revolutionary War had been won by the American colonists, the monetary system was in a state of total disarray. To remedy this situation, the new Constitution of the United States, approved in 1789, allowed Congress to issue money. The individual states could no longer have their own money supply. A few years later, the Coinage Act of 1792 made the dollar the official currency of the United States and put the country on a bimetallic standard. In this bimetallic system, both gold and silver were legal money, and the rate of exchange of silver to gold was fixed by the government at sixteen to one.

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Just two months after the flight of Apollo 10, the Apollo 11 astronauts made their historic landing on the surface of the Moon. This momentous trip for humanity also provided scientists with an abundance of material for study; from rock and soil samples brought back from the Moon, scientists have been able to determine much about the composition of the Moon (as well as to draw) inferences about the development of the Moon from its composition.

The Moon soil that came back on Apollo 11 contains small bits of rock and glass which were probably ground from larger rocks when meteors impacted with the surface of the Moon. The bits of glass are spherical in shape and constitute approximately half of the Moon soil. Scientists found no trace of animal or plant life in this soil.

In addition to the Moon soil, astronauts gathered two basic types of rocks from the surface of the Moon: Basalt and breccia. Basalt is a cooled and hardened volcanic lava common to the Earth. Since basalt is formed under extremely high temperatures, the presence of this type of rock is an indication that the temperature of the Moon was once extremely hot. Breccia, the other kind of rock brought back by the astronauts, was formed during the impact of falling objects on the surface of the Moon. It consists of small pieces of rock compressed together by the force of impact. Gases such as hydrogen and helium were found in some of the rocks, and scientists believe that these gases were carried to the Moon by the solar wind, the streams of gases that are constantly emitted by the Sun.

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Marianne Moore (1887-1972) once said that her writing could be called poetry only because there was no other name for it. Indeed her poems appear to be extremely compressed essays that happen to be printed in jagged lines on the page. Her subjects were varied: animals, laborers, artists, and the craft of poetry. From her general reading came quotations that she found striking or insightful. She included these in her poems, scrupulously enclosed in quotation marks, and sometimes identified in footnotes. Of this practice, she wrote, "Why many quotation marks?" I am asked ... When a thing has been so well that it could not be said better, why paraphrase it? Hence, my writing is, if not a cabinet of fossils, a kind of collection of flies in amber." Close observation and concentration on detail and the methods of her poetry.

Marianne Moore grew up in Kirkwood, Missouri, near St. Lois. After graduation from Bryn Mawr College in 1909, she taught commercial subjects at the Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Later she became a librarian in New York City. During the 1920’s she was editor of The Dial, an important literary magazine of the period. She lived quietly all her life, mostly in Brooklyn, New York. She spent a lot of time at the Bronx Zoo, fascinated by animals. Her admiration of the Brooklyn Dodgers-before the team moved to Los Angeles-was widely known.

Her first book of poems was published in London in 1921 by a group of friends associated with the Imagist movement. From that time on her poetry has been read with interest by succeeding generations of poets and readers. In 1952 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her Collected Poems. She wrote that she did not write poetry for money or fame. To earn a living is needful, but it can be done in routine ways. One writes because one has a burning desire to objectify what it is indispensable to one's happiness to express.

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For a century before the Erie Canal was built, there was much discussion among the general population of the Northeast as to the need for connecting the waterways of the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean. A project of such monumental proportions was not going to be undertaken and completed without a supreme amount of effort.

The man who was instrumental in accomplishing the feat that was the Erie Canal was Dewitt Clinton. As early as 1812, he was in the nation's capital petitioning the federal government for financial assistance on the project, emphasizing what a boon to the economy of the country the canal would be; his efforts with the federal government, however, were not successful.

In 1816, Clinton asked the New York State Legislature for the funding for the canal, and this time he did succeed. A canal commission was instituted, and Clinton himself was made head of it. One year later, Clinton was elected governor of the state, and soon after, construction of the canal was started.

The canal took eight years to complete, and Clinton was on the first barge to travel the length of the canal, the Seneca Chief, which departed from Buffalo on October 26, 1825, and arrived in New York City on November 4. Because of the success of the Erie Canal, numerous other canals were built in other parts of the country.