Chuyên đề 20: Kiểm tra (Phần 2)

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 from 34 to 38. 

Psychologists have long known that having a set of cherished companions is crucial to mental well-being. A recent study by Australian investigators concluded that our friends even help to prolong  our lives. The study concentrated on the social environment, general health, and lifestyle of 1,477 persons older than 70 years. The participants were asked how (24) ______ contact they had with friends, children, relatives and acquaintances. Researchers were surprised to learn that friendships increased life expectancy to a far greater extent than frequent contact with children and other relatives. This benefit held true even after these friends had moved away to another city and was independent of factors such as socioeconomic status, health, and way of life. According to scientists, the ability to have relationships with people to (25) ______ one is important has a positive effect on physical and mental health. Stress and tendency towards depression are reduced, and behaviours that are damaging to health, such as smoking and drinking, occur less frequently. (26)_______, our support networks, in times of calamity in particular, can raise our moods and feelings of self-worth and offer helpful strategies for dealing with difficult personal challenges.

(Source: Academic Vocabulary in Use by Michael McCarthy and Felicity O’Dell)

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 following questions.

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)

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 following 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)

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D to indicate the answer to each of the question.

In the near term, the goal of keeping AI’s impact on society beneficial motivates research in many areas, from economics and law to technical topics such as verification, validity, security and control. Whereas it may be little more than a minor nuisance if your laptop crashes or gets hacked, it becomes all the more important that an AI system does what you want it to do if it controls your car, your airplane, your pacemaker, your automated trading system or your power grid. Another short-term challenge is preventing a devastating arms race in lethal autonomous weapons.

In the long term, an important question is what will happen if the quest for strong AI succeeds and an AI system becomes better than humans at all cognitive tasks. Such a system could potentially undergo recursive self-improvement, triggering an intelligence explosion leaving human intellect far behind. By inventing revolutionary new technologies, such a super-intelligence might help us eradicate war, disease, and poverty, and so the creation of strong AI might be the biggest event in human history. Some experts have expressed concern, though, that it might also be the last, unless we learn to align the goals of the AI with ours before it becomes super-intelligent.

There are some who question whether strong AI will ever be achieved, and others who insist that the creation of super-intelligent AI is guaranteed to be beneficial. At FLI we recognize both of these possibilities, but also recognize the potential for an artificial intelligence system to intentionally or unintentionally cause great harm. We believe research today will help us better prepare for and prevent such potentially negative consequences in the future, thus enjoying the benefits of AI while avoiding pitfalls.

                                                                                              (source: https://www.beyondteaching.com/)

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

We need to attend to the tree loss because of the following tree benefits. Firstly, trees provide shade for homes, office buildings, parks and roadways, cooling surface temperatures. They also take in and evaporate water, (39) ______ cools the air around them. Secondly, trees absorb carbon and remove pollutants from the atmosphere. Trees also reduce energy costs by $4 billion a year, according to Nowak's study. "The shading of those trees on buildings (40) ______ your air conditioning costs. Take those trees away; now your buildings are heating up, you're running your air conditioning more, and you're burning more fuel from the power plants, so the pollution and emissions go up." (41) ______, trees act as water filters, taking in dirty surface water and absorbing nitrogen and phosphorus into the soil. Last but not least, (42)______ studies have found connections between exposure to nature and better mental and physical health. Some hospitals have added tree views and plantings for patients as a result of these studies. Doctors are even prescribing walks in nature for children and families due to evidence that nature exposure lowers blood (43) ______ and stress hormones. And studies have associated living near green areas with lower death rates.

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

Nepal has made important progress over the past few years to promote equality, but the country still has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world. 41% of Nepalese girls are married before the age of 18.

Poverty is both a cause and consequence of child marriage in Nepal. Girls from the wealthiest families marry 2 years later than those from the poorest, who are seen as an economic burden, and who drop out of school and earn little money.

Food insecurity plays an important role too. Nepalese families that do not have enough food to eat are more likely to marry their daughters at a young age to decrease the financial burden. One study shows that 91% of people who had secure access to food married over the age of 19.

Dowry is also common practice in many communities. Parents marry their daughters as soon as possible because the money they have to pay to the groom’s family is higher if their daughter is older. Since 2010, the legal age of marriage is 20 for both men and women, or 18 with parental consent, according to the Nepalese Country Code.

The law states that punishment for child marriage is imprisonment for up to three years and a fine of up to 10,000 rupees (£102). But reports suggest that this law is rarely applied. There has been quite a lot of progress in Nepal over the past 3 years with a clear government commitment to ending child marriage and civil society cooperation. The Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare is currently developing Nepal’s first national strategy on child marriage in collaboration with UNICEF Nepal and Girls Not Brides Nepal. However, the post-earthquake and post-fuel crisis environment has meant progress is slow and the national strategy has been delayed.

(Adapted from http://www.girlsnotbrides.org/)