Chuyên đề ôn thi Kĩ năng đọc Tiếng Anh 12 - Đọc - Hiểu có đáp án

Read the following passage and mark the Better A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the following questions (Trích “Đề thi THPT QG 2019”)

  Norwich is the capital of East Anglia, an area on the east coast of England which is famous for its natural beauty and impressive architecture. Norwich is a wonderful city to explore and is popular with tourists all year round.

  Norwich is not a city of luxurious hotels, but it has a good selection of reasonably priced places to stay in, both in the city centre and further out. The Beeches Hotel, for example, next to the cathedral, has a beautiful Victorian garden. Comfortable accommodation costs £65 for two nights’ bed and breakfast per person. Norwich is famous for its magnificent cathedral. The cathedral has summer programme of music and events which is open to the general public. One event, “Fire from Heaven”, is a drama and musical performance with fireworks, a laser light show and a carnival with local people dressed in colourful costumes.

  Norwich is also home to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, a world-class collection of international art in a building at the University of East Anglia. This is well worth a visit and there is a lovely canteen with an excellent selection of hot and cold snacks. It also specializes in vegetarian food. In addition, the city has a new professional theatre, the Playhouse, on the River Wensum. The city’s annual international arts festival is from 10 to 20 October

  Finally, if you fancy a complete break from the stresses of everyday life, you could hire a boat and spend few days cruising along the rivers of the famous Norfolk Broads National Park. In our environmentally friendly age, the emphasis has moved towards the quiet enjoyment of nature and wildlife. You can hire a boat, big or small, for an hour or two or even up to a week or two. This makes a perfect day out or holiday for people of all ages.

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.

* Passage 1

INTERNET JOBS

  Contrary to popular belief, one does not have to be a trained programmer to work online. Of course, there are plenty of jobs available for people with high-tech computer skills, but the growth of new media has opened up a wide range of Internet career opportunities requiring only a minimal level of technical expertise. Probably one of the most well-known online job opportunities is the job of webmaster. However, it is hard to define one basic job description for this position. The qualifications and responsibilities depend on what tasks a particular organization needs a webmaster to perform.

  To specify the job description of a webmaster, one needs to identify the hardware and software that the website the webmaster will manage is running on. Different types of hardware and software require different skill sets to manage them. Another key factor is whether the website will be running internally (at the firm itself) or externally (renting shared space on the company servers). Finally, the responsibilities of a webmaster also depend on whether he or she will be working independently, or whether the firm will provide people to help. All of these factors need to be considered before one can create an accurate webmaster job description.

  Webmaster is one type of Internet career requiring in-depth knowledge of the latest computer applications. However, there are also online jobs available for which traditional skills remain in high demand. Content jobs require excellent writing skills and a good sense of the web as a “new media”.

   The term “new media” is difficult to define because it encompasses a constantly growing set of new technologies and skills. Specifically, it includes websites, email, Internet technology, CD-ROM, DVD, streaming audio and video, interactive multimedia presentations, e-books, digital music, computer illustration, video games, virtually reality, and computer artistry.

   Additionally, many of today’s Internet careers are becoming paid-by-the-job professions. With many companies having to downsize in tough economic items, the outsourcing and contracting of freelance workers online has become common business practice. The Internet provides an infinite pool of buyers from around the world with whom freelancers are able to work on projects with companies outside their own country of residence.

   How much can a person make in these kinds of career? As with many questions related to today’s evolving technology, there is no simple answer. There are many companies willing to pay people with technical Internet skills salaries well above $70,000 a year. Generally, webmasters start at about $30,000 per year, but salaries can vary greatly. Freelance writers working online have been known to make between $40,000 and $70,000 per year.

Most people can remember a phone number for up to thirty seconds. When this short amount of time elapses, however, the numbers are erased from the memory. How did the information get there in the first place? Information that makes its way to the short term memory (STM) does so via the sensory storage area. The brain has a filter which only allows stimuli that is of immediate interest to pass on to the STM, also known as the working memory.

   There is much debate about the capacity and duration of the short term memory. The most accepted theory comes from George A. Miller, a cognitive psychologist who suggested that humans can remember approximately seven chunks of information. A chunk is defined as a meaningful unit of information, such as a word or name rather than just a letter or number. Modern theorists suggest that one can increase the capacity of the short term memory by chunking, or classifying similar information together. By organizing information, one can optimize the STM, and improve the chances of a memory being passed on to long term storage.

   When making a conscious effort to memorize something, such as information for an exam, many people engage in “rote rehearsal”. By repeating something over and over again, one is able to keep a memory alive. Unfortunately, this type of memory maintenance only succeeds if there are no interruptions. As soon as a person stops rehearsing the information, it has the tendency to disappear. When a pen and paper are not handy, people often attempt to remember a phone number by repeating it aloud. If the doorbell rings or the dog barks to come in before a person has the opportunity to make a phone call, he will likely forget the number instantly. Therefore, rote rehearsal is not an efficient way to pass information from the short term to long term memory. A better way is to practice “elaborate rehearsal”. This involves assigning semantic meaning to a piece of information so that it can be filed along with other pre-existing long term memories.

   Encoding information semantically also makes it more retrievable. Retrieving information can be done by recognition or recall. Humans can easily recall memories that are stored in the long term memory and used often; however, if a memory seems to be forgotten, it may eventually be retrieved by prompting. The more cues a person is given (such as pictures), the more likely a memory can be retrieved. This is why multiple choice tests are often used for subjects that require a lot of memorization.

As the twentieth century began, the importance of formal education in the United States increased. The frontier had mostly disappeared and by 1910 most Americans lived in towns and cities. Industrialization and the bureaucratization of economic life combine with a new emphasis upon credentials and expertise to make schooling increasingly important for economic and social mobility.

   Increasingly, too, schools were viewed as the most important means of integrating immigrants into American society. The arrival of a great wave of southern and eastern European immigrants at the turn of the century coincided with and contributed to an enormous expansion of formal schooling. By 1920 schooling to age fourteen or beyond was compulsory in most states, and the school year was greatly lengthened. Kindergartens, vacation schools, extracurricular activities, and vocational education and counseling extended the influence of public schools over the lives of students, many of whom in the larger industrial cities were the children of immigrants. Classes for adult immigrants were sponsored by public schools, corporations, unions, churches, settlement houses, and other agencies.

   Reformers early in the twentieth century suggested that education programs should suit the needs of specific populations. Immigrant women were one such population. Schools tried to educate young women so they could occupy productive places in the urban industrial economy, and one place many educators considered appropriate for women was the home. Although looking after the house and family was familiar to immigrant women, homemaking a new definition. In preindustrial economies, homemaking had meant the production as well as the consumption of goods, and it commonly included income-producing activities both inside and outside the home. In the highly industrialized early-twentieth-century United States, however, overproduction rather than scarcity was becoming a problem. Thus, the ideal American homemaker was viewed as a consumer rather than a producer. Schools trained women to be consumer homemakers-cooking, shopping, decorating, and caring for children “efficiently” in their own homes, or if economic necessity demanded, as employees in the homes of others. Subsequent reforms have made these notions seem quite out-of-date.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the term “icebox” had entered the American language, but ice was still only beginning to affect the diet of ordinary citizens in the United States. The ice trade grew with the growth of cities. Ice was used in hotels, Line taverns, and hospitals, and by some forward-looking city dealers in fresh meat, fresh fish, and butter. After the Civil War(1861 -1865), as ice was used to refrigerate freight cars, st also came into household use. Even before 1880, half the ice sold in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and one-third of that sold in Boston and Chicago, went to families for their own use. This had become possible because a new household convenience, the icebox, a precursor of the modern refrigerator, had been invented.

   Making an efficient ice box was not as easy as we might now suppose. In the early nineteenth century, the knowledge of the physics of heat, which was essential to a science of refrigeration, was rudimentary. The commonsense notion that the best icebox was one that prevented the ice from melting was of course mistaken, for it was the melting of the ice that performed the cooling. Nevertheless, early efforts to economize ice included wrapping the ice in blankets, which kept the ice from doing its job. Not until near the end of the nineteenth century did inventors achieve the delicate balance of insulation and circulation needed for an efficient icebox.

   But as early as 1803, an ingenious Maryland farmer, Thomas Moore, had been on the right track. He owned a farm about twenty miles outside the city of Washington, for which the village of Georgetown was the market center. When he used an icebox of his own design to transport his butter to market, he found that customers would pass up the rapidly melting stuff in the tubs of his competitors to pay a premium price for his butter, still fresh and hard in neat, one-pound bricks. One advantage of his icebox, Moore explained, was that farmers would no longer have to travel to market at night in order to keep their produce cool.

Naturalists and casual observers alike have been struck by the special relationship between squirrels and acorns (the seeds of oak trees). Ecologists, though, cannot observe these energetic mammals scurrying up and down oak trees and eating and burying acorns without wondering about their complex relationship with trees. Are squirrels dispersers and planters of oak forests or pesky seed predators? The answer is not simple. Squirrels may devour many acorns, but by storing and failing to recover up to 74 percent of them (as they do when seeds are abundant), these arboreal can also aid regeneration and dispersal of the oaks.

   Their destructive powers are well documented. According to one report, squirrels destroyed tens of thousands of fallen acorns from an oak stand on the University of Indiana campus. A professor there estimated that each of the large while oaks had produced between two and eight thousand acorns, but within weeks of seed maturity, Hardly an intact acorn could be found among the fallen leaves.

   Deer, turkey, wild pigs, and bears also feed heavily on acorns, but do not store them, and are therefore of no benefit to the trees. Flying squirrels, chipmunks, and mice are also unlikely to promote tree dispersa - whose behavior of caching (hiding) acorns below the leaf litter often promotes successful germination of acorns - and perhaps bluejays, important long-distance dispersers, seem to help oaks spread and reproduce.

   Among squirrels, though, there is a particularly puzzling behavior pattern. Squirrels pry off the caps of acorns, bite through the shells to get at the nutritious inner kernels, and then discard them half-eaten. The

ground under towing oaks is often littered with thousands of half-eaten acorns, each one only bitten from the top. Why would any animal waste so much time and energy and risk exposure to such predators as redrtail hawks only to leave a large part of each acorn uneaten? While research is not conclusive at this point, one thing that is certain is that squirrels do hide some of the uneaten portions, and these acorn halves, many of which contain the seeds, may later germinate.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, almost nothing was written about the contribution of women during the colonial period and the early history of the newly formed United States. Lacking the right to vote and absent from the seats of power, women were not considered an important force in history. Anne Bradstreet wrote some significant poetry in the seventeenth century, Mercy Otis Warren produced the best contemporary history of the American Revolution, and Abigail Adams penned important letters showing she exercised great political influence over her husband, John, the second President of the United States. But little or no notice was taken of these contributions. During these centuries, women remained invisible in history books.

   Throughout the nineteenth century, this lack of visibility continued, despite the efforts of female authors writing about women. These writers, like most of their male counterparts, were amateur historians. Their writings were celebratory in nature, and they were uncritical in their selection and use of sources.

   During the nineteenth century, however, certain feminists showed a keen sense of history by keeping records of activities in which women were engaged. National, regional, and local women’s organizations compiled accounts of their doings. Personal correspondence, newspaper clippings, and souvenirs were saved and stored. These sources form the core of the two greatest collections of women’s history in the United States - one at the Elizabeth and Arthur Schlesinger Library at Radeliffe College, and the other the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College. Such sources have provided valuable materials for later generations of historians.

   Despite the gathering of more information about ordinary women during the nineteenth century, most of the writing about women conformed to the “great women” theory of history, just as much of mainstream American history concentrated on “great men”. To demonstrate that women were making significant contributions to American life, female authors singled out women leaders and wrote biographies, or else important women produced their autobiographies. Most of these leaders were involved in public life as reformers, activists working for women’s right to vote, or authors, and were not representative at all of the great mass of ordinary women. The lives of ordinary people continued, generally, to be untold in the American histories being published.

In the last third of the nineteenth century a new housing form was quietly being developed. In 1869 the Stuyvesant, considered New York’s first apartment house, was built on East Eighteenth street. The building was financed by the developed Rutherfurd Stuyvesant and designed by Richard Morris Hunt, the first American architect to graduate from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Each man had lived in Paris, and each understood the economic and social potential of this Parisian housing form. But the Stuyvesant was at best a limited success. In spite of Hunt’s inviting facade, the living space was awkwardly arranged. Those who could afford them were quite content to reunion in the more sumptuous, single-family homes, leaving the Stuyvesant to young married couples and bachelors.

   The fundamental problem with the Stuyvesant and the other early apartment buildings that quickly followed, in the late 1870’s and early 1880’s, was that they were confined to the typical New York building lot. That lot was a rectangular area 25 feet wide by 100 feet deep-a shape perfectly suited for a row house. The lot could also accommodate a rectangular tenement, though it could not vield the square, well-lighted, and logically arranged rooms that great apartment buildings require. But even with the awkward interior configurations of the early apartment buildings, the idea caught on. It met the needs of a large and growing population that wanted something better than tenements but could not afford or did not want row houses.

   So while the city’s newly emerging social leadership commissioned their mansions, apartment houses and hotels began to sprout on multiple lots, thus breaking the initial space constraints. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, large apartment houses began dotting the developed portions of New York City, and by the opening decades of the twentieth century, spacious buildings, such as the Dakota and the Ansonia, finally transcended the light confinement of row house building lots. From there it was only a small step to building luxury apartment houses on the newly created Park Avenue, right next to the fashionable Fifth avenue shopping area.