15000 bài tập tách từ đề thi thử môn Tiếng Anh có đáp án (Phần 88)

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)

A trend that has emerged recently is the sharing of childcare (321) __________ between husband and wife. Young couples will try to arrange their work schedules so that they work opposite hours or shifts in order that one parent is always home with the children. Since childcare is expensive, this saves money for the young couple trying to establish themselves and provide a secure environment for the family. Husband and wife may also share household chores. Some fathers are just as capable as mothers at cooking dinner, changing and bathing the baby, and doing the laundry.

In some cases, the woman’s salary is for family (322) __________ and the father becomes the “househusband." These cases are still fairly rare. One positive trend, however, is that fathers seem to be spending more time with their children. In a recent survey, 41% of the children sampled said they spend equal time with their mothers and fathers. “This is one of our most significant cultural changes,” says Dr. Leon Hoffman, who co-directs the Parent Child Center at the New York Psychoanalytic Society. In practice, for over 30 years, Hoffman has found "a very dramatic difference in the involvement of the father in everything from care-taking to general decision (323) __________ around kids' lives.”

Another factor has recently been added to the childcare formula. The number of people who work from home nearly full-time rose 23% from the last decade. The (324) _________ of technology - computers, faxes, teleconferencing - has made it easier for at-home workers to be constantly in touch.

If parents bring up a child with the sole aim of turning the child into a genius, they will cause a disaster. According to several leading educational psychologists, this is one of the biggest mistakes which ambitious parents make. Generally, the child will be only too aware of what his parents expect, and will fail. Unrealistic parental expectations can cause great damage to children.

However, if parents are not too unrealistic about what they expect their children to do, but are ambitious in a sensible way, the child may succeed in doing very well — especially if the parents are very supportive of their child. Michael Collins is very lucky. He is crazy about music, and his parents help him a lot by taking him to concerts and arranging private piano and violin lessons for him. They even drive him 50 kilometers twice a week for violin lessons. Michael's mother knows very little about music, but his father plays the trumpet in a large orchestra. However, he never makes Michael enter music competitions if he is unwilling.

Winston Smith, Michael's friend, however, is not so lucky. Both his parents are successful musicians, and they set too high a standard for Winston. They want their son to be as successful as they are and so they enter him for every piano competition held. They are very unhappy when he does not win. Winston is always afraid that he will disappoint his parents and now he always seems quiet and unhappy.

In addition to their military role, the forts of the nineteenth century provided numerous other benefits for the American West. The establishment of these posts opened new roads and provided for the protection of daring adventurers and expeditions as well as established settlers. Forts also served as bases where enterprising entrepreneurs could bring commerce to the West, providing supplies and refreshments to soldiers as well as to pioneers. Posts like Fort Laramie provided supplies for wagon trains traveling the natural highways toward new frontiers. Some posts became stations for the pony express; still others, such as Fort Davis, were stagecoach stops for weary travelers. All of these functions, of course, suggest that the contributions of the forts to the civilization and development of the West extended beyond patrol duty.

Through the establishment of military posts, yet other contributions were made to the development of western culture. Many posts maintained libraries or reading rooms, and some – for example, Fort Davis had schools. Post chapels provided a setting for religious services and weddings. Throughout the wilderness, post bands provided entertainment and boosted morale. During the last part of the nineteenth century, to reduce expenses, gardening was encouraged at the forts, thus making experimental agriculture another activity of the military. The military stationed at the various forts also played a role in civilian life by assisting in maintaining order, and civilian officials often called on the army for protection.

Certainly, among other significant contributions the army made to the improvement of the conditions of life was the investigation of the relationships among health, climate, and architecture. From the earliest colonial times throughout the nineteenth century, disease ranked as the foremost problem in defense. It slowed construction of forts and inhibited their military functions. Official documents from many regions contained innumerable reports of sickness that virtually incapacitated entire garrisons. In response to the problems, detailed observations of architecture and climate and their relationships to the frequency of the occurrence of various diseases were recorded at various posts across the nation by military surgeons.

Rural America is diverse in many ways. As we have seen, no one industry dominates the rural economy, no single pattern of population decline or (341)________ exists for all rural areas, and no statement about improvements and gaps in well-being holds true for all rural people.

Many of these differences are regional in nature. That is, rural areas within a particular geographic region of the country often tend to be similar (342)_______ each other and different from areas in another region. Some industries, for example, are (343)_______ with different regions – logging and sawmills in the Pacific Northwest and New England, manufacturing in the Southeast and Midwest, and farming in the Great Plains. Persistent poverty also has a regional pattern, concentrated primarily in the Southeast. Other differences follow no regional pattern. Areas that rely heavily on the services industry are located throughout rural America, as are rural areas that have little access to advanced telecommunications services. Many of these differences, regional and non-regional, are the result of a (344)______ of factors including the availability of natural resources; distance from and access to major metropolitan areas and the information and services found there; transportation and shipping facilities; political history and structure; and the racial, ethnic, and (345)______ makeup of the population.

Adapted from “Understanding Rural America”, InfoUSA

In my experience, freshmen today are different from those I knew when I started as a counselor and professor 25 years ago. College has always been demanding both academically and socially. But students now are less mature and often not ready for the responsibility of being in college.

It is really too easy to point the finger at parents who protect their children from life’s obstacles. Parents, who handle every difficulty and every other responsibility for their children from writing admission essays to picking college courses, certainly may contribute to their children’s lack of coping strategies. But we can look even more broadly to the social trends of today.

How many people do you know who are on medication to prevent anxiety or depression? The number of students who arrive at college already medicated for unwanted emotions has increased dramatically in the past 10 years. We, as a society, don’t want to “feel” anything unpleasant and we certainly don’t want our children to “suffer”.

The resulting problem is that by not experiencing negative emotions, one does not learn the necessary skills to tolerate and negotiate adversity. As a psychologist, I am well aware of the fact that some individuals suffer from depression and anxiety and can benefit from treatment, but I question the growing number of medicated adolescents today.

Our world is more stressful in general because of the current economic and political realities, but I don’t believe that the college experience itself is more intense today than that of the past 10 years. What I do think is that many students are often not prepared to be young “adults” with all the responsibilities of life. What does this mean for college faculty and staff? We are required to assist in the basic parenting of these students - the student who complains that her professor didn’t remind her of the due date for an assignment that was clearly listed on the syllabus and the student who cheats on an assignment in spite of careful instructions about plagiarism.

As college professors, we have to explain what it means to be an independent college student before we can even begin to teach. As parents and teachers we should expect young people to meet challenges. To encourage them in this direction, we have to step back and let them fail and pick themselves up and move forward. This approach needs to begin at an early age so that college can actually be a passage to independent adulthood.

(Adapted from “Students are different now” by Linda Bips. New York Times, October 11, 2010

Most of us know a little about how babies learn to talk. From the time infants are born, they hear language because their parents talk to them all the time. Between the ages of seven and ten months, most infants begin to make sounds. They repeat the same sounds over and over again. This is called babbling. When babies babble, they are practicing their language.

What happens, though, to children who cannot hear? How do deaf children learn to communicate? Recently, doctors have learned that deaf babies babble with their hands. Laura Ann Petitto, a psychologist, observed three hearing infants with English-speaking parents and two deaf infants with deaf parents using American Sign Language (ASL) to communicate. Dr. Petitto studied the babies three times: at 10, 12, and 14 months. During this time, children really begin to develop their language skills.

After watching and videotaping the children for several hundred hours, the psychologist and her assistants made many important observations. For example, they saw that the hearing children made varied motions with their hands. However, there appeared to be no pattern to these motions. The deaf babies also made different movements with their hands, but these movements were more consistent and deliberate. The deaf babies seemed to make the same hand movements over and over again. During the four-month period, the deaf babies' hand motions started to resemble some basic hand-shapes used in ASL. The children also seemed to prefer certain hand-shapes.

Hearing infants start first with simple syllable babbling, then put more syllables together to sound like real sentences and questions. Apparently, deaf babies follow this same pattern, too. First, they repeat simple hand- shapes. Next, they form some simple hand signs and use these movements together to resemble ASL sentences.

Linguists believe that our ability for language is innate. In other words, humans are born with the capacity for language: It does not matter if we are physically able to speak or not. Language can be expressed in different ways - for instance, by speech or by sign. Dr. Petitto believes this theory and wants to prove it. She plans to study hearing children who have one deaf parent and one hearing parent. She wants to see what happens when babies have the opportunity to learn both sign language and speech. Does the human brain prefer speech? Some of these studies of hearing babies who have one deaf parent and one hearing parent show that the babies babble equally with their hands and their voices. They also produce their first words, both spoken and signed, at about the same time. More studies in the future may prove that the sign system of the deaf is the physical equivalent of speech.

Adapted from “Issues for Today” by Lorraine C. Smith and Nancy Nici Mare

In the United States and Canada, it is very important to (361) ______ a person directly in the eyes when you are having a conversation with him or her. If you look down or to the side when the (362) ______ person is talking, that person will think that you are not interested in what he or she is saying. This, of course, is not polite. If you look down or to the side when you are talking, it might (363) ______ that you are not honest. However, people who are speaking will sometimes look away for (364) ______ seconds when they are thinking or trying to find the right word. But they always turn immediately back to look the listener directly in the eyes. These social "rules" are (365) ______ for two men, two women, a man and a woman, or an adult and a child.

The Ring of Fire is an enormous chain of volcanoes all around the Pacific Ocean. The ring goes from New Zealand up to Asia and across the ocean to Alaska. From Alaska, the ring continues southward along the coast of both North and South America. More than seventy-five percent of the world's volcanoes are located in this ring. Scientists are interested in studying the Ring of Fire because they can observe plate tectonics at work there. In 1912, a German scientist, Alfred Wegener, came up with the first theory of land movement. Wegener said continents are made up of lighter rocks resting on heavier material. Similar to the way large things move while floating on water, Wegener suggested that the positions of the continents were not fixed, but that they moved slightly. Later, scientists discovered most of Wegener's ideas were right on the mark. They then developed the theory called plate tectonics. According to plate tectonics, the surface of the Earth consists of a number of enormous plates or sections of rock, each about eighty kilometers thick. The plates float and slowly move at speeds between one to ten centimeters every year. That is about the rate your fingernails grow! Within the Ring of Fire, new material for the Earth's plates is constantly being created as hot liquid rock called magma flows from the center of the Earth up to the ocean floor. All the existing plates on the Earth's surface have to move slightly to make room for the new material. As plates move both away from and toward each other, they run into each other. When they hit each other, one plate might move under another. This process is called subduction. Subduction frequently causes earthquakes. It may also result in the bottom plate melting due to the extreme temperatures under the top plate. The magma created in this process can rise to the Earth's surface and come out through volcanoes, as can be seen along the Ring of Fire.

On a winter night last June, José Antonio Tuki, a 30-year-old artist on Easter Island, sat on Anakena beach and stared at the enormous human statues there – the moai. The statues are from four feet tall to 33 feet tall. Some weigh more than 80 tons. They were carved a long time ago, with stone tools, and then they were

moved up to 11 miles to the beach. Tuki stares at their faces and he feels a connection. ‘This is something that was produced by my ancestors’, he says. ‘How did they do it?’

 The first Polynesians arrived at Rapa Nui (Easter Island), probably by canoe, hundreds of years ago. The island is 2,150 miles west of South America and 1,300 miles east of its nearest inhabited neighbour, Pitcairn. Nowadays 12 flights arrive every week from Chile, Peru and Tahiti. In 2011, 50,000 tourists – ten times the

island’s population – flew to Easter Island. Almost all of the jobs on Easter Island depend on tourism. And the tourists go there for only one thing: the moai. People around the world became curious about the statues after the Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl made Easter Island famous, and there are different theories about how the statues were moved to the beach. Many researchers think the statues were pulled along the ground using ropes and wood. Pulitzer Prize winner Jared Diamond has suggested that many people were needed to build and move the

moai. As a result, the island’s trees were cut down for wood and to create farming land. This open land was

fragile and it was soon eroded by the strong winds, so it was very difficult to grow food. The situation was an early example of an ecological disaster, according to Diamond. On the other hand, archaeologists Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii and Carl Lipo of California State

University Long Beach have a more positive view of the island’s history. They suggest that the inhabitants actually pioneered a type of sustainable farming – they built thousands of circular stone walls, called manavai, and grew food inside them. And their theory about how the moai were moved is that they were ‘walked’ along using a system of only ropes and a few people.

As José Tuki contemplates these enormous statues, he doesn’t mind that there are no definite answers about the history of his island. ‘I want to know the truth,’ he says, ‘but maybe knowing everything would take its power away’.