15000 bài tập tách từ đề thi thử môn Tiếng Anh có đáp án (Phần 24)

Simply being bilingual doesn’t qualify someone to interpret. Interpreting is not only a mechanical process of converting one sentence in language A into the same sentence in language B. Rather, it’s a complex art in which thoughts and idioms that have no obvious counterparts from tongue to tongue _ or words that have several meanings must be quickly transformed in such a way that the message is clearly and accurately expressed to the listener.

At one international conference, an American speaker said, “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sows ear”, which meant nothing to the Spanish audience. The interpretation was, “A monkey in a silk dress is still a monkey” - an idiom the Spanish understood and that expressed the same idea.

There are 2 kinds of interpreters, simultaneous and consecutive. The former, sitting in a separated booth, usually at a large multilingual conference, speaks to listeners wearing headphones, interpreting what a foreign language speaker says actually a sentence behind. Consecutive interpreters are the ones most international negotiations use. They are employed for smaller meetings without sound booths and headphones. Consecutive interpretation also requires two-person teams. A foreign speaker says his piece while the interpreter, using a special shorthand, takes notes and during a pause, tells the client what was said.

Fish that live on the sea bottom benefit by being flat and hugging the contours. There are two very different types of flatfish and they have evolved in very separate ways. The skates and rays, relatives of the sharks have become flat in what might be called the obvious way. Their bodies have grown out sideways to form great “wings” They look as though they have been flattened but have remained symmetrical and “the right way up”. Conversely fish such as plaice, sole, and halibut have become flat in a different way. There are bony fish which have a marked tendency to be flattened in a vertical direction; they are much “taller” than they are wide. They use their whole vertically flattened bodies as swimming surfaces, which undulate through the water as they move. Therefore when * their ancestors migrated to the seabed, they lay on one side than on their bellies. However, this raises the problem that one eye was always looking down into the sand and was effectively useless - In evolution this problem was solved by the lower eye “moving” around the other side. We see this process of moving around enacted in the development of every young bony flatfish. It starts life swimming near the surface, and is symmetrical and vertically flattened, but then the skull starts to grow in a strange asymmetrical twisted fashion, so that one eye for instance the left, moves over the top of the head upwards, an old Picasso - like vision. Incidentally, some species of 20 flatfish settle on the right side, others on the left, and others on either side.

Millions of people are using cell phones today. In many places, it is actually considered unusual not to use one. In many countries, cell phones are very popular with young people. They find that the phones are more than a means of communication - having a mobile phone shows that they are cool and connected.

    The explosion in mobile phone use around the world has made some health professionals worried. Some doctors are concerned that in the future, many people may suffer health problems from the use of mobile phones. In England, there has been a serious debate about this issue. Mobile phone companies are worried about the negative publicity of such ideas. They say that there is no proof that mobile phones are bad for your health. On the other hand, medical studies have shown changes in the brain cells of some people who use mobile phones. Signs of change in the tissues of the brain and head can be detected with modern scanning equipment. In one case, a traveling salesman had to retire at young age because of serious memory loss. He couldn't remember even simple tasks. He would often forget the name of his own son. This man used to talk on his mobile phone for about six hours a day, every day of his working week, for a couple of years. His family doctor blamed his mobile phone use, but his employer's doctor didn't agree.

    What is it that makes mobile phones potentially harmful? The answer is radiation. High-tech machines can detect very small amounts of radiation from mobile phones. Mobile phone companies agree that there is some radiation, but they say the amount is too small to worry about. As the discussion about their safety continues, it appears that it's best to use mobile phones less often. Use your regular phone if you want to talk for a long time. Use your mobile phone only when you really need it. Mobile phones can be very useful and convenient, especially in emergencies. In the future, mobile phones may have a warning label that says they are bad for your health. So for now, it's wise not to use your mobile phone too often.

You can usually tell when your friends are happy or angry by the looks on their faces or by their actions. This is useful because reading their emotional expressions helps you to know how to respond to them. Emotions have evolved to help us respond to important situations and to convey our intentions to others. But does raising the eyebrows and rounding the mouth say the same thing in Minneapolis as it does in Madagascar? Much research on emotional expressions has centered on such questions.

    According to Paul Ekman, the leading researcher in this area, people speak and understand substantially the same "facial language". Studies by Ekman's group have demonstrated that humans share a set of universal emotional expressions that testify to the common biological heritage of the human species. Smiles, for example, signal happiness and frowns indicate sadness on the faces of people in such far- flung places as Argentina, Japan, Spain, Hungary, Poland , Sumatra ,the United States, Vietnam, the jungles of New Guinea , and the Eskimo villages north of Artic Circle. Ekman and his colleagues claim that people everywhere can recognize at least seven basic emotions: sadness, fear, anger, disgust, contempt, happiness, and surprise. There are, however, huge differences across cultures in both the context and intensity of emotional displays - the so called display rules. In many Asian cultures, for example, children are taught to control emotional responses - especially negative ones- while many American children are encouraged to express their feelings more openly. Regardless of culture, however, emotions usually show themselves, to some degree , in people's behavior. From their first days of life, babies produce facial expressions that communicate their feelings.

    The ability to read facial expressions develops early, too. Very young children pay close attention to facial expressions, and by age five, they nearly equal adults in their skill at reading emotions on people's faces. This evidence all points to a biological underpinning for our abilities to express and interpret a basic set of human emotions. Moreover, as Charles Darwin pointed out over a century ago, some emotional expressions seem to appear across species boundaries. Cross - cultural psychologists tell us that certain emotional responses carry different meanings in different cultures. For example, what emotion do you suppose might be conveyed by sticking out your tongue? For Americans, this might indicate disgust, while in China it can signify surprise. Likewise, a grin on an American face may indicate joy, while on a Japanese face it may just as easily mean embarrassment. Clearly, culture influences emotional expressions.

Duncan Phyfe made some of the most beautiful furniture found in America. His family name was originally Fife, and he was born in Scotland in 1768. In 1784, the Fife family immigrated to Albany, New York where Duncan’s father opened a cabinetmaking shop. Duncan followed his father’s footsteps and was apprenticed to a cabinetmaker. After completing his training, Duncan moved to New York City.

    Duncan Fife was first mentioned in the 1792 NYC Directory as a furniture “joiner” in business at 2 Broad Street. Two years later, he moved, expanded his business, and changed his name to Phyfe. He was a quiet-living, God-fearing young man who felt his new name would probably appeal to potential customers who were definitely anti-British in this post-Revolutionary War period.

    Duncan Phyfe’s name distinguished him from his contemporaries. Although the new spelling helped him better compete with French emigrant craftsmen, his new name had more to do with hanging it on a sign over his door stoop.

    The artisans and merchants who came to America discovered a unique kind of freedom. They were no longer restricted by class and guild traditions of Europe. For the first time in history, a man learned that by working hard, he could build his business based on his own name and reputation and quality of work.

    Phyfe’s workshop apparently took off immediately. At the peak of his success, Phyfe employed 100 craftsmen. Some economic historians point to Phyfe as having employed division of labor and an assembly line. What his workshop produced shows Phyfe’s absolute dedication to quality in workmanship. Each piece of furniture was made of the best available materials. He was reported to have paid $1,000 for a single Santo Domingo mahogany log.

Phyfe did not create new designs. Rather, he borrowed from a broad range of the period’s classical styles, Empire, Sheraton, Regency, and French Classical among them. Nevertheless, Phyfe’s high quality craftsmanship established him as America’s patriotic interpreter of European design in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

    Although the number of pieces produced by Duncan Phyfe’s workshop is enormous, comparatively few marked or labeled pieces have been found extant. In antiques shops and auctions, collectors have paid $11,000 for a card table, $24,200 for a tea table, and $93,500 for a sewing table.

After the United States purchased Louisiana from France and made it their newest territory in 1803, President Thomas Jefferson called for an expedition to investigate the land the United States had bought for $15 million. Jefferson’s secretary, Meriwether Lewis, a woodsman and a hunter from childhood, persuaded the president to let him lead this expedition. Lewis recruited Army officer William Clark to be his co-commander. The Lewis and Clark expedition led the two young explorers to discover a new natural wealth of variety and abundance about which they would return to tell the world.

    When Lewis and Clark departed from St. Louis in 1804, they had twenty-nine in their party, including a few Frenchmen and several men from Kentucky who were well-known frontiersmen. Along the way, they picked up an interpreter named Toussant Charbonneau and his Native American wife, Sacajawea, the Shoshoni “Bird Woman” who aided them as guide and peacemaker and later became an American legend.

    The expedition followed the Missouri River to its source, made a long portage overland though the Rocky Mountains, and descended the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean. On the journey, they encountered peaceful Otos, whom they befriended, and hostile Teton Sioux, who demanded tribute from all traders. They also met Shoshoni, who welcomed their little sister Sacajawea, who had been abducted as a child by the Mandans. They discovered a paradise full of giant buffalo herds and elk and antelope so innocent of human contact that they tamely approached the men. The explorers also found a hell blighted by mosquitoes and winters harsher than anyone could reasonably hope to survive. They became desperately lost, then found their way again. Lewis and Clark kept detailed journals of the expedition, cataloging a dazzling array of new plants and animals, and even unearthing the bones of a forty-five-foot dinosaur.

    When the party returned to St. Louis in 1806 after travelling almost 8,000 miles, they were eagerly greeted and grandly entertained. Their glowing descriptions of this vast new West provided a boon to the westward migration now becoming a permanent part of American life. The journals written by Lewis and Clark are still widely read today.

In the explosion of the linguistic life cycle, it is apparent that it is much more difficult to learn a second language in adulthood than a first language in childhood. Most adults never completely master a foreign language, especially in Phonology – hence the ubiquitous foreign accent. Their development often “fossilizes” into permanent error patterns that no teaching or correction can undo. Of course, there are great individual differences, which depend on effort, attitudes, amount of exposure, quality of teaching and plain talent, but there seems to be a cap for the best adults in the best circumstances

Many explanations have been advanced for children’s superiority; they exploit Motherese (the simplified, repetitive conversation between parents and children), make errors unself-consciously, are more motivated to communicate, like to conform, are not set in their ways, and have not first language to interfere. But some of these accounts are unlikely, based on what is known about how language acquisition works. Recent evidence is calling these social and motivation explanations into doubt. Holding every other factor constant, a key factor stands out: sheer age

Systematic evidence comes from the psychologist Elissa Newport and her colleagues. They tested Korean and Chinese – born students at the University of Illinois who had spent a least ten years in the United States. The immigrants were give a list of 276 simple English sentences, half of them containing some grammatical error. The immigrants who came to the United States between the age of 3 and 7 performed identically to American – born students. Those who arrived between ages 8 and 15 did worse the latter they arrived, and those who arrived between 17 and 39 did the worst of all, and showed huge variability unrelated to their age of arrival

The time when human crossed the Arctic land bridge from Siberia to Alaska seems remote to us today, but actually represents a late stage in the prehistory of humans, an era when polished stone implements and bows and arrows were already being used and dogs had already been domesticated

When these early migrants arrived in North America, they found the woods and plains dominated by three types of American mammoths. These elephants were distinguished from today’s elephants mainly by their thick, shaggy coats and their huge, upward-curving tusks. They had arrived on the continent hundreds of thousands of years before their followers. The woody mammoth in the North, the Columbian mammoth in middle North America, and the imperial mammoth of the South, together with their distant cousins the mastodons, dominated the land. Here, as in the Old World, there is evidence that humans hunted these elephants, as shown by numerous spear points found with mammoth remains

Then, at the end of the Ice Age, when the last glaciers had retreated, there was a relatively sudden and widespread extinction of elephants. In the New World, both mammoths and mastodons disappeared. In the Old World, only Indian and African elephants survived.

Why did the huge, seemingly successful mammoths disappear? Were humans connected with their extinction? Perhaps, but at that time, although they were cunning hunters, humans were still widely settled and not very numerous. It is difficult to see how they could have prevailed over the mammoth to such an extent

THE DIGITAL DIVIDE

Information technology is influencing the way many of us live and work today. We use the Internet to look and apply for jobs, shop, conduct research, make airline reservations, and explore areas of interest. We use e-mail and the Internet to communicate instantaneously with friends and business associates around the world. Computers are commonplace in homes and the workplace.

Although the number of Internet users is growing exponentially each year, most of the world’s population does not have access to computers or the Internet. Only 6 percent of the population in developing countries are connected to telephones. Although more than 94 percent of U.S. households have a telephone, only 42 percent have personal computers at home and 26 percent have Internet access. The lack of what most of us would consider a basic communications necessity –the telephone –does not occur just in developing nations. On some Native American reservations only 60 percent of the residents have a telephone. The move to wireless connections may eliminate the need for telephone lines, but it does not remove the barrier to equipment costs.

Who has Internet access? Fifty percent of the children in urban households with an income over $75,000 have Internet access, compared with 2 percent of the children in low-income, rural households. Nearly half of college-educated people have Internet access, compared to 6 percent of those with only some high school education. Forty percent of households with two parents have access; 15 percent of female, single-parent households do. Thirty percent of white households, 11 percent of black households, and 13 percent of Hispanic households have access. Teens and children are the two fastest-growing segments of Internet users. The digital divide between the populations who have access to the Internet and information technology tools is based on income, race, education, household type, and geographic location. Only 16 percent of the rural poor, rural and central city minorities, young householders, and single parent female households are connected..

Another problem that exacerbates these disparities is that African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans hold few of the jobs in information technology. Women hold about 20 percent of these jobs and are receiving fewer than 30 percent of the computer science degrees. The result is that women and members of the most oppressed ethnic groups are not eligible for the jobs with the highest salaries at graduation. Baccalaureate candidates with degrees in computer science were offered the highest salaries of all new college graduates in 1998 at $44,949.

Do similar disparities exist in schools? More than 90 percent of all schools in the country are wired with at least one Internet connection. The number of classrooms with Internet connections differs by the income level of students. Using the percentage of students who are eligible for free lunches at a school to determine income level, we see that nearly twice as many of the schools with more affluent students have wired classrooms as those with high concentrations of low-income students.

Access to computers and the Internet will be important in reducing disparities between groups. It will require greater equality across diverse groups whose members develop knowledge and skills in computer and information technologies. If computers and the Internet are to be used to promote equality, they will have to become accessible to populations that cannot currently afford the equipment which needs to be updated every three years or so. However, access alone is not enough. Students will have to be interacting with the technology in authentic settings. As technology becomes a tool for learning in almost all courses taken by students, it will be seen as a means to an end rather than an end in itself. If it is used in culturally relevant ways, all students can benefit from its power.

Cooperation is the common endeavor of two or more people to perform a task or reach a jointly cherished goal. Like competition and conflict, there are different forms of cooperation, based on group organization and attitudes.

In the first form, known as primary cooperation, group and individual fuse. The group contains nearly all of each individual’s life. The rewards of the group’s work are shared with each member. There is an interlocking identity of individual, group and task performed. Means and goals become one, for cooperation itself is valued.

While primary cooperation is most often characteristic of preliterature societies, secondary cooperation is characteristic of many modern societies. In secondary cooperation, individuals devote only part of their lives to the group. Cooperation itself is not a value. Most members of the group feel loyalty, but the welfare of the group is not the first consideration. Members perform tasks so that they can separately enjoy the fruits of their cooperation in the form of salary, prestige, or power. Business offices and professional athletic teams are examples of secondary cooperation.

In the third type, called tertiary cooperation or accommodation, latent conflict underlies the shared work. The attitudes of the cooperating parties are purely opportunistic: the organization is loose and fragile. Accommodation involves common means to achieve antagonistic goals: it breaks down when the common means cease to aid each party in reaching its goals. This is not, strictly speaking, cooperation at all, and hence the somewhat contradictory term antagonistic cooperation is sometimes used for this relationship.