15000 bài tập tách từ đề thi thử môn Tiếng Anh có đáp án (Phần 21)

Most journeys in Britain and the US are made by road. Some of these are made on public transport but most are by private car.

    In Britain many people rely on their cars for daily local activities, e.g. getting to work, doing the shopping, and visiting friends. People living in urban areas may use buses, trains or, in London, the Underground, to get to city centres, mainly because traffic is often heavy and it is difficult to find anywhere to park a car. Some places in the country may have a bus only two or three times a week so people living there have no choice but to rely on their cars.

    In the US large cities have good public transportation systems. The El railroad in Chicago and the underground systems of New York, Boston, San Francisco and Washington, DC are heavily used. Elsewhere, most Americans prefer to use their cars. Families often have two cars and, outside major cities, have to drive fairly long distances to schools, offices, shops, banks, etc. Many college and even high-school students have their own cars.

    Long-distance travel in Britain is also mainly by road, though railways link most towns and cities. Most places are linked by motorways or other fast roads and many people prefer to drive at their own convenience rather than use a train, even though they may get stuck in a traffic jam. Long- distance coach/bus services are usually a cheaper alternative to trains, but they take longer and may be less comfortable. Some long-distance travel, especially that undertaken for business reasons, may be by air. There are regular flights between regional airports, as well as to and from London. A lot of freight is also distributed by road, though heavier items and raw materials often go by rail.

    In the US much long-distance travel is by air. America has two main long-distance bus companies, Greyhound and Trailways. Amtrak, the national network, provides rail services for passengers. Private railway companies such as Union Pacific now carry only freight, though in fact over 70% of freight goes by road.

    The main problems associated with road transport in both Britain and the US are traffic congestion and pollution. It is predicted that the number of cars on British roads will increase by a third within a few years, making both these problems worse. The British government would like more people to use public transport, but so far they have had little success in persuading people to give up their cars or to share rides with neighbours. Most people say that public transport is simply not good enough. Americans too have resisted government requests to share cars because it is less convenient and restricts their freedom. Petrol/gasoline is relatively cheap in the US and outside the major cities public transport is bad, so they see no reason to use their cars less.

(Extracted from Oxford Guide to British and American Culture, Oxford University Press, 2000)

In 1826, a Frenchman named Niépce needed pictures for his business. He was not a good artist, so he invented a very simple camera. He put it in a window of his house and took a picture of his yard. That was the first photograph.

    The next important date in the history of photography was 1837. That year, Daguerre, another Frenchman, took a picture of his studio. He used a new kind of camera and a different process. In his pictures, you could see everything clearly, even the smallest details. This kind of photograph was called a daguerreotype.

    Soon, other people began to use Daguerre's process. Travelers brought back daguerreotypes from all around the world. People photographed famous buildings, cities, and mountains.

    In about 1840, the process was improved. Then photographers could take pictures of people and moving things. The process was not simple and photographers had to carry lots of film and processing equipment. However, this did not stop photographers, especially in the United States. After 1840, daguerreotype artists were popular in most cities.

Matthew Brady was one well-known American photographer. He took many portraits of famous people. The portraits were unusual because they were lifelike and full of personality. Brady was also the first person to take pictures of a war. His 1862 Civil War pictures showed dead soldiers and ruined cities. They made the war seem more real and more terrible.

In the 1880s, new inventions began to change photography. Photographers could buy film ready- made in rolls, instead of having to make the film themselves. Also, they did not have to process the film immediately. They could bring it back to their studios and develop it later. They did not have to carry lots of equipment. And finally, the invention of the small handheld camera made photography less expensive.

    With a small camera, anyone could be a photographer. People began to use cameras just for fun. They took pictures of their families, friends, and favorite places. They called these pictures "snapshots".

    Documentary photographs became popular in newspapers in the 1890s. Soon magazines and books also used them. These pictures showed true events and people. They were much more real than drawings.

    Some people began to think of photography as a form of art. They thought that photographycould do more than show the real world. It could also show ideas and feelings, like other art forms.

From “Reading Power” by Beatrice S. Mikulecky and Linda Jeffries

The countryside of Britain is well known for its beauty and many contrasts: it bare mountains and moorland, its lakes, rivers and woods, and its long, often wild coastline. Many of the most beautiful areas are national parks and are protected from development. When Britain people think of the countryside they think of farmland, as well as open spaces. They imagined cows or sheep in greenfield enclosed by hedges or stone walls and field of wheat and barley. Most farmland is privately owned but is crossed by a network of public footpaths.
          Many people associate the countryside with peace and relaxation. They spend their free time walking or cycling there, or go to the country for a picnic or a pub lunch. In summer people go to fruit farms and pick strawberries and other fruit. Only a few people who live in the country work on farms. Many commute to work in towns. Many others dream of living in the country, where they believe they would have a better and healthier lifestyle.
          The countryside faces many threats. Some are associated with modern farming practices, and the use of chemical harmful to plants and wildlife. Land is also needed for new houses. The green belt, an area of land around many cities, is under increasing pressure. Plans to build new roads are strongly opposed by organizations trying to protect the countryside. Protesters set up camps to prevent, or at least delay the building work.
          America has many areas of wild and beautiful scenery, and there are many areas, especially in the West in States like Montana and Wyoming, where few people living. In the New England states, such as Vermont and New Hampshire, it is common to see small farm surrounded by hills and green areas. In Ohio, Indianan, Illinoisan and other Midwestern states, field of corns or wheat reach to the horizon and there are many miles between towns.
          Only about 20% of Americans live outside cities and towns. Life may be difficult for people who live in the country. Services like hospitals and schools may be further away and going shopping can mean driving long distances. Some people even have to drive from their homes to the main road where their mail is left in a box. In spite of the disadvantages, many people who live in the country say that they like the safe, clean, attractive environment. But their children often move to a town or city as soon as they can

Experts in climatology and other scientists are becoming extremely concerned about the changes to our climate which are taking place. Admittedly, climate changes have occurred on our planet before. For example, there have been several ice ages or glacial periods.
          These climatic changes, however, were different from the modern ones in that they occurred gradually and, as far as we know, naturally. The changes currently being monitored are said to be the result not of natural causes, but of human activity. Furthermore, the rate of change is becoming alarmingly rapid.
          The major problem is that the planet appears to be warming up. According to some experts, this warming process, known as global warming, is occurring at a rate unprecedented in the last 10,000 years. The implications for the planet are very serious. Rising global temperatures could give rise to such ecological disasters as extremely high increases in the incidence of flooding and of droughts. These in turn could have a harmful effect on agriculture.
          It is thought that this unusual warming of the Earth has been caused by so-called greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, being emitted into the atmosphere by car engines and modern industrial processes, for example. Such gases not only add to the pollution of the atmosphere, but also create a greenhouse effect, by which the heat of the sun is trapped. This leads to the warming up of the planet.
          Politicians are also concerned about climate change and there are now regular summits on the subject, attended by representatives from around 180 of the world’s industrialized countries. Of these summits, the most important took place in Kyotoin Japanin 1997. There it was agreed that the most industrialized countries would try to reduce the volume of greenhouse gas emissions and were given targets for this reduction of emissions.
          It was also suggested that more forests should be planted to create so-called sinks to absorb greenhouse gases. At least part of the problem of rapid climate change has been caused by too drastic deforestation.
          Sadly, the targets are not being met. Even more sadly, global warnings about climate changes are often still being regarded as scaremongering

A team of Russian scientists has challenged the theory that the woolly mammoths became extinct 10,000 years ago at the end of the Ice Age. The scientists have reported that the beasts may have survived until 2000 B.C. on an island off the coast of Siberia, where researchers uncovered 29 fossilized woolly mammoth teeth ranging in age from 4,000 to 7,000 years. The question to be asked now is, how did these prehistoric pachyderms survive in their island environment? One possibility is that they adapted to their confined surroundings by decreasing their bulk. This theory is based on their smaller tooth size, which has led scientists to believe that they were only 6 feet tall at the shoulder compared with 10 feet of their full-sized counterpart. But would this be enough to enable them to survive thousands of years beyond that of other mammoths? Researchers are still working to uncover the reasons for this isolated group's belated disappearance.

As heart disease continues to be the number-one killer in the United States, researchers have become increasingly interested in identifying the potential risk factors that trigger heart attacks. High-fat diets and "life in the fast lane" have long been known to contribute to the high incidence of heart failure. But according to new studies, the list of risk factors may be significantly longer and quite surprising.

Heart failure, for example, appears to have seasonal and temporal patterns. A higher percentage of heart attacks occur in cold weather, and more people experience heart failure on Monday than on any other day of the week. In addition, people are more susceptible to heart attacks in the first few hours after waking. Cardiologists first observed this morning phenomenon in the mid-1980, and have since discovered a number of possible causes. An early-morning rise in blood pressure, heart rate, and concentration of heart stimulating hormones, plus a reduction of blood flow to the heart, may all contribute to the higher incidence of heart attacks between the hours of 8:00 A.M. and 10:00 A.M.

In other studies, both birthdays and bachelorhood have been implicated as risk factors. Statistics reveal that heart attack rates increase significantly for both females and males in the few days immediately preceding and following their birthdays. And unmarried men are more at risk for heart attacks than their married counterparts. Though stress is thought to be linked in some way to all of the aforementioned risk factors, intense research continues in the hope of further comprehending why and how heart failure is triggered.

A small but growing group of scholars, evolutionary psychologists, are being to sketch the contours of the human mind as designed by natural selection. Some of them even anticipate the coming of a field called "mismatch theory", which would study maladies resulting from contrasts between the modern environment and the "ancestral environment". The one we were designed for. There is no shortage of such maladies to study. Rates of depression have been doubling in some industrial countries roughly every 10 years. Suicide is the third most common cause of death among young adults, after car wrecks and homicides.

    Evolutionary psychology is a long way from explaining all this with precision, but it is already shedding enough light to challenge some conventional wisdom. It suggests for example, that the nostalgia for the nuclear family of the 1950s is in some way misguided-that the model family of husband at work and wife at home is hardly a "natural" and the healthful living arrangement, especially for the wives. Moreover, the bygone lifestyles that do look fairly by commercialism. Perhaps the biggest surprise from evolutionary psychology is it depiction of the "animal" in us. Freud, and various thinkers since, saw "civilization" as an oppressive force that thwarts basic animal instincts and urges and transmutes them into psychopathology. However, evolutionary psychology suggests that a large threat to mental health may be the way civilization thwarts civility. There is a gentler, kinder side of human

nature, and it seems increasingly to be a victim of repression in modern society.

Long before they can actually speak, babies pay special attention to the speech they hear around them. Within the first month of their lives, babies' responses to the sound of the human voice will be different from their responses to other sorts of auditory stimuli. They will stop crying when they hear a person talking, but not if they hear a bell or the sound of a rattle. At first, the sounds that an infant notices might be only those words that receive the heaviest emphasis and that often occur at the ends of utterances. By the time they are six or seven weeks old, babies can detect the difference between syllables pronounced with rising and falling inflections. Very soon, these differences in adult stress and intonation can influence babies' emotional states and behavior. Long before they develop actual language comprehension, babies can sense when an adult is playful or angry, attempting to initiate or terminate new behavior, and so on, merely on the basis of cues such as the rate, volume, and melody of adult speech. Adults make it as easy as they can for babies to pick up a language by exaggerating such cues. One researcher observed babies and their mothers in six diverse cultures and found that, in all six languages, the mothers used simplified syntax, short utterances and nonsense sounds, and transformed certain sounds into baby talk. Other investigators have noted that when mothers talk to babies who are only a few months old, they exaggerate the pitch, loudness, and intensity of their words. They also exaggerate their facial expressions, hold vowels longer, and emphasize certain words.

More significant for language development than their response to general intonation is observation that tiny babies can make relatively fine distinctions between speech sounds. In other words, babies enter the world with the ability to make precisely those perceptual discriminations that are necessary if they are to acquire aural language.

Babies obviously derive pleasure from sound input, too: even as young as nine months they will listen to songs or stories, although the words themselves are beyond their understanding. For babies, language is a sensory-motor delight rather than the route to prosaic meaning that it often is for adults.

It is estimated that over 99 percent of all species that ever existed have become extinct. What causes extinction? When a species is no longer adapted to a changed environment, it may perish. The exact causes of a species’ death vary from situation to situation. Rapid ecological change may render an environment hostile to a species. For example, temperatures may change and a species may not be able to adapt. Food Resources may be affected by environmental changes, which will then cause problems for a species requiring these resources. Other species may become better adapted to an environment, resulting in competition and, ultimately, in the death of a species.

    The fossil record reveals that extinction has occurred throughout the history of Earth. Recent analyses have also revealed that on some occasions many species became extinct at the same time – a mass extinction. One of the best-known examples of mass extinction occurred 65 million years ago with the demise of dinosaurs and many other forms of life. Perhaps the largest mass extinction was the one that occurred 225 million years ago. When approximately 95 percent of all species died, mass extinctions can be caused by a relatively rapid change in the environment and can be worsened by the close interrelationship of many species. If, for example, something were to happen to destroy much of the plankton in the oceans, then the oxygen content of Earth would drop, affection even organisms not living in the oceans. Such a change would probably lead to a mass extinction.

    One interesting, and controversial, finding is that extinctions during the past 250 million years have tended to be more intense every 26 million years. This periodic extinction might be due to intersection of the Earth’s orbit with a cloud of comets, but this theory is purely speculative. Some researchers have also speculated that extinction may often be random. That is, certain species may be eliminated and others may survive for no particular reason. A species’ survival may have nothing to do with its ability or inability to adapt. If so, some of evolutionary history may reflect a sequence of essentially random events.

Learning means acquiring knowledge or developing the ability to perform new behaviors. It is common to think of learning as something that takes place in school, but much of human learning occurs outside the classroom, and people continue to learn throughout their lives.

Even before they enter school, young children learn to walk, to talk, and to use their hands to manipulate toys, food, and other objects. They use all of their senses to learn about the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells in their environments. They learn how to interact with their parents, siblings, friends, and other people important to their world. When they enter school, children learn basic academic subjects such as reading, writing, and mathematics. They also continue to learn a great deal outside the classroom. They learn which behaviors are likely to be rewarded and which are likely to be punished. They learn social skills for interacting with other children. After they finish school, people must learn to adapt to the many major changes that affect their lives, such as getting married, raising children, and finding and keeping a job.

    Because learning continues throughout our lives and affects almost everything we do, the study of learning is important in many different fields. Teachers need to understand the best ways to educate children. Psychologists, social workers, criminologists, and other human-service workers need to understand how certain experiences change people’s behaviors. Employers, politicians, and advertisers make use of the principles of learning to influence the behavior of workers, voters, and consumers.

    Learning is closely related to memory, which is the storage of information in the brain. Psychologists who study memory are interested in how the brain stores knowledge, where this storage takes place, and how the brain later retrieves knowledge when we need it. In contrast, psychologists who study learning are more interested in behavior and how behavior changes as a result of a person’s experiences.

    There are many forms of learning, ranging from simple to complex. Simple forms of learning involve a single stimulus. A stimulus is anything perceptible to the senses, such as a sight, sound, smell, touch, or taste. In a form of learning known as classical conditioning, people learn to associate two stimuli that occur in sequence, such as lightning followed by thunder. In operant conditioning, people learn by forming an association between a behavior and its consequences (reward or punishment). People and animals can also learn by observation - that is, by watching others perform behaviors. More complex forms of learning include learning languages, concepts, and motor skills.

(Extracted from Microsoft® Student 2009 – DVD Version)