15000 bài tập tách từ đề thi thử môn Tiếng Anh có đáp án (Phần 27)

One of the factors contributing to the intense nature of twenty-first-century stress is our continual exposure to media – particularly to an overabundance of news. If you feel stressed out by the news, you are far from alone. Yet somehow many of us seem unable to prevent ourselves from tuning in to an extreme degree.

         The further back we go in human history, the longer news took to travel from place to place, and the less news we had of distant people and lands altogether. The printing press obviously changed all that, as did every subsequent development in transportation and telecommunication.

         When television came along, it proliferated like a poplulation of rabbits. In 1950, there were 100,000 television sets in North American homes; one year later there were more then a million. Today, it’s not unusual for a home to have three or more television sets, each with cable access to perhaps over a hundred channels. News is the subject of many of those channels, and on several of them it runs 24 hours a day.

        What’s more, after the traumatic events of Sptember 11, 2001, live newcasts were paired with perennial text crawls across the bottom of the screen – so that viewers could stay abreast of every story all the time.

        Needless to say, the news that is reported to us is not good news, but rather disturbing images and sound bytes alluding to diasater (natural and man-made), upheaval, crime, scandal, war, and the like. Compounding the proplem is that when actual breaking news is scarce, most broadcasts fill in with waistline, hairline, or very existence in the future. This variety of story tends to treat with equal alarm a potentially lethal flu outbreak and the bogus claims of a wrinkle cream that overpromises smooth skin.

       Are humans meant to be able to process so much trauma – not to mention so much overblown anticipation of potetial trauma – at once? The human brain, remember, is programmed to slip into alarm mode when danger looms. Danger looms for someone, somewhere at every moment. Exposing ourslves to such input without respite and without perspective cannot be anything other than a source of chronic stress.

(Extracted from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Beating Stress by Arlene Matthew Uhl – Penguin Group 2006)

According to the passage, which of the following has contributed to the intense nature of twenty-first-century stress?

In the past, we had less news of distant people and lands because ______.

The word “traumatic” in paragraph 4 is closest in meaning to _______.

According to the passage, when there is not enough actual breaking news, broadcasts

Which of the following is NOT true, according to the passage?

The word “slip” in paragraph 6 is closest in meaning to ______.

According to the passage, our continual exposure to bad news without perspective is obviously ________.

What is probably the best title for this passage?

THE SAVANNAH

The tourist looking at the African savannah on a summer afternoon might be excused for thinking that the wide yellow grass plain was completely deserted of life, almost a desert. With only a few small thorn trees sticking out through the veldt, there seems to be almost no place for a living creature to hide.

However, under those trees you might find small steenbok, sleeping in the shade, and waiting for the night to fall. There may even be a small group of lions somewhere, their bodies exactly the same shade as the tall grass around them. In the holes in the ground a host of tiny creatures, from rabbits and badgers to rats and' snakes are waiting for the heat to finish.

The tall grass also hides the fact that there may be a small stream running across the middle of the plain. One clue that there may be water here is the sight of a majestic Marshall eagle circling slowly over the grassland. When he drops, he may come up with a small fish, or maybe a grass snake that has been waiting at the edge of a pool in the hope of catching a frog.

The best time to see the animals then, is in the evening, just as the sun is setting. The best time of the year to come is in late September, or early August, just before the rains. Then the animals must come to the waterholes, as there is no other place for them to drink. And they like to come while it is still light; so they can see if any dangers are creeping up on them.

So it is at sunset, and after the night falls, that the creatures of the African veld rise and go about their business.

The savannah appears to be empty because:

By "go about their business" the writer means:

What kind of book does the text seem to be from?

The phrase "be excused for" in paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to

The phrase "a host of" in paragraph 2 is closest in meaning to

Why do animals come to the waterholes while it is still light?

The word "he" in paragraph 3 refers to

The ability of falling cats to right themselves in midair and land on their feet has been a source of wonder for ages. Biologists long regarded it as an example of adaptation by natural selection, but for physicists it bordered on the miraculous.

Newton's laws of motion assume that the total amount of spin of a body cannot change unless an external torque speeds it up or slows it down. If a cat has no spin when it isreleased and experiences no external torque, it ought not to be able to twist around as it falls.

In the speed of its execution, the righting of a tumbling cat resembles a magician's trick. The gyrations of the cat in midair are too fast for the human eye to follow, so the process is obscured. Either the eye must be speeded up, or the cat's fall slowed down for the phenomenon to be observed. A century ago the former was accomplished by means of high-speed photography using equipment now available in any pharmacy. But in the nineteenth century the capture on film of a falling cat constituted a scientific experiment.

          The experiment was described in a paper presented to the Paris Academy in 1894. Two sequences of twenty photographs each, one from the side and one from behind, show a white cat in the act of righting itself. Grainy and quaint though they are, the photos show that the cat was dropped upside down, with no initial spin, and still landed on its feet. Careful analysis of the photos reveals the secret; as the cat rotates the front of its body clockwise, the rear and tail twist counterclockwise, so that the total spin remains zero, in perfect accord with Newton's laws. Halfway down, the cat pulls in its legs before reversing its twist and then extends them again, with the desired end result. The explanation was that while nobody can acquire spin without torque, a flexible one can readily change its orientation, or phase. Cats know this instinctively, but scientists could not be sure how it happened until they increased the speed of their perceptions a thousandfold.

What does the passage mainly discuss?

The word “process” in line 10 refers to

Why are the photographs mentioned in line 16 referred to as an “experiment”?

Which of the following can be inferred about high-speed photography in the late 1800's?

The word “rotates” in line 19 is closest in meaning to

According to the passage, a cat is able to right itself in midair because it is

How did scientists increase “the speed of their perceptions a thousandfold” (lines 25-26)?

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 43 to 50.

         With Robert Laurent and William Zorach, direct carving enters into the story of modern sculpture in the United States. Direct carving - in which the sculptors themselves carve stone or wood with mallet and chisel - must be recognized as something more than just a technique. Implicit in it is an aesthetic principle as well:that the medium has certain qualities of beauty and expressiveness with whichsculptors must bring their own aesthetic sensibilities into harmony. For example, sometimes the shape or veining in a piece of stone or wood suggests, perhaps even dictates, not only the ultimate form, but even the subject matter.

The technique of direct carving was a break with the nineteenth-century tradition in which the making of a clay model was considered the creative act and the work was then turned over to studio assistants to be cast in plaster or bronze or carved in marble.

Neoclassical sculptors seldom held a mallet or chisel in their own hands, readily conceding that the assistants they employed were far better than they were at carving the finished marble.With the turn-of-the-century Crafts movement and the discovery of nontraditional sources of inspiration, such as wooden African figures and masks, there arose a new urge for hands-on, personal execution of art and an interaction with the medium. Even as early as the 1880's and 1890's, nonconformist European artists were attempting direct carving. By the second decade of the twentieth century, Americans — Laurent and Zorach most notably — had adopted it as their primary means of working.

Born in France, Robert Laurent(1890-1970)was a prodigy who received his education in the United States. In 1905 he was sent to Paris as an apprentice to an art dealer, and in the years that followed he witnessed the birth of Cubism, discovered primitive art, and learned the techniques of woodcarving from a frame maker.

Back in New York City by 1910, Laurent began carving pieces such as The Priestess, which reveals his fascination with African, pre-Columbian, and South Pacific art. Taking a walnut plank, the sculptor carved the expressive, stylized design. It is one of the earliest examples of direct carving in American sculpture. The plank's form dictated the rigidly frontal view and the low relief. Even its irregular shape must have appealed to Laurent as a break with a long-standing tradition that required a sculptor to work within a perfect rectangle or square.

The word “medium” in line 5 could be used to refer to

What is one of the fundamental principles of direct carving?

The word “dictates” in line 8 is closest in meaning to

How does direct carving differ from the nineteenth-century tradition of sculpture?

The word “witnessed” in line 23 is closest in meaning to

Where did Robert Laurent learn to carve?

The phrase “a break with” in line 30 is closest in meaning to

The piece titled The Priestess has all of the following characteristics EXCEPT

The hard, rigid plates that form the outermost portion of the Earth are about 100 kilometers thick. These plates include both the Earth's crust and the upper mantle. The rocks of the crust are composed mostly of minerals with light elements, like aluminum and sodium, while the mantle contains some heavier elements, like iron and magnesium. Together, the crust and upper mantle that form the surface plates are called the lithosphere. This rigid layer floats on the denser material of the lower mantle the way a wooden raft floats on a pond. The plates are supported by a weak, plastic layer of the lower mantle called the asthenosphere. Also like a raft on a pond, the lithospheric plates are carried along by slow currents in this more fluid layer beneath them.

With an understanding of plate tectonics, geologists have put together a new history for the Earth's surface. About 200 million years ago, the plates at the Earth's surface formed a “supercontinent” called Pangaea. When this supercontinent started to tear apart because of plate movement, Pangaea first broke into two large continental masses with a newly formed sea that grew between the land areas as the depression filled with water. The southern one — which included the modern continents of South America, Africa, Australia, and Antarctica — is called Gondwanaland. The northern one — with North America, Europe, and Asia — is called Laurasia. North America tore away from Europe about 180 million years ago, forming the northern Atlantic Ocean. Some of the lithospheric plates carry ocean floor and others carry land masses or a combination of the two types. The movement of the lithospheric plates is responsible for earthquakes, volcanoes, and the Earth's largest mountain ranges. Current understanding of the interaction between different plates explains why these occur where they do. For example, the edge of the Pacific Ocean has been called the “Ring of Fire” because so many volcanic eruptions and earthquakes happen there. Before the 1960's, geologists could not explain why active volcanoes and strong earthquakes were concentrated in that region. The theory of plate tectonics gave them an answer.

With which of the following topics is the passage mainly concerned?

According to the passage, the lithospheric plates are given support by the

The author compares the relationship between the lithosphere and the asthenosphere to which of the following?

The word “one” in line 14 refers to

According to the passage, the northern Atlantic Ocean was formed when

Which of the following can be inferred about the theory of plate tectonics?

The paragraph following the passage most probably discusses

In line 27, the word “concentrated” is closest in meaning to which of the following?

The changing profile of a city in the United States is apparent in the shifting definitions used by the United States Bureau of the Census. In 1870 the census officially distinguished the nation's “urban” from its “rural” population for the first time. “Urban population” was defined as persons living in towns of 8,000 inhabitants or more. But after 1900 it meant persons living in incorporated places having 2,500 or more inhabitants. Then, in 1950 the Census Bureau radically changed its definition of “urban” to take account of the new vagueness of city boundaries. In addition to persons living in incorporated units of 2,500 or more, the census now included those who lived in unincorporated units of that size, and also all persons living in the densely settled urban fringe, including both incorporated and unincorporated areas located around cities of 50,000 inhabitants or more. Each such unit, conceived as an integrated economic and social unit with a large population nucleus, was named a Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA).

          Each SMSA would contain at least (a) one central city with 50,000 inhabitants or more or (b) two cities having shared boundaries and constituting, for general economic and social purposes, a single community with a combined population of at least 50,000, the smaller of which must have a population of at least 15,000. Such an area included the county in which the central city is located, and adjacent counties that are found to be metropolitan in character and economically and socially integrated with the county of the central city. By 1970, about two-thirds of the population of the United States was living in these urbanized areas, and of that figure more than half were living outside the central cities.

While the Census Bureau and the United States government used the term SMSA (by 1969 there were 233 of them), social scientists were also using new terms to describe the elusive, vaguely defined areas reaching out from what used to be simple “towns” and “cities”. A host of terms came into use: “metropolitan regions,” “polynucleated population groups”, “conurbations,” “metropolitan clusters,” “megalopolises,” and so on.

What does the passage mainly discuss?

According to the passage, the population of the United States was first classified as rural or urban in

According to the passage, why did the Census Bureau revise the definition of urban in 1950?

Which of the following is NOT true of an SMSA?

By 1970, what proportion of the population in the United States did NOT live in an SMSA?

The Census Bureau first used the term “SMSA” in

Prior to 1900, how many inhabitants would a town have to have before being defined as urban?

In the American colonies there was little money. England did not supply the colonies with coins and did not allow the colonies to make their own coins, except for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which received permission for a short period in 1652 to make several kinds of silver coins. England wanted to keep money out of America as a means of controlling trade: America was forced to trade only with England if it did not have the money to buy products from other countries. The result during this pre-revolutionary period was that the colonists used various goods in place of money: beaver pelts, Indian wampum, and tobacco leaves were all commonly used substitutes for money. The colonists also made use of any foreign coins they could obtain. Dutch, Spanish, French, and English coins were all in use in the American colonies.

During the Revolutionary War, funds were needed to finance the world, so each of the individual states and the Continental Congress issued paper money. So much of this paper money was printed that by the end of the war, almost no one would accept it. As a result, trade in goods and the use of foreign coins still flourished during this period.

By the time the Revolutionary War had been won by the American colonists, the monetary system was in a state of total disarray. To remedy this situation, the new Constitution of the United States, approved in 1789, allowed Congress to issue money. The individual states could no longer have their own money supply. A few years later, the Coinage Act of 1792 made the dollar the official currency of the United States and put the country on a bimetallic standard. In this bimetallic system, both gold and silver were legal money, and the rate of exchange of silver to gold was fixed by the government at sixteen to one.

The passage mainly discusses

The passage indicates that during the colonial period, money was

The Massachusetts Bay Colony was allowed to make coins

The pronoun “it” in paragraph 2 refers to which of the following

The word “remedy” in paragraph 3 is closest in meaning to

How was the monetary system arranged in the Constitution?

According to the passage, which of the following is NOT true about the bimetallic monetary system?

A survey is a study, generally in the form of an interview or a questionnaire, that provides information concerning how people think and act. In the United States, the best-known surveys are the Gallup and the Harris poll. As anyone who watches the news during presidential campaigns knows, these polls have become an important part of political life in the United States.

             North American are familiar with many “person on the street” interviews on local television news shows. While such interviews can be highly entertaining, they are not necessarily an accurate indication of public opinion. First, they reflect the opinions of only those people who appear at a certain location. Thus, such samples can be biased in favor of commuters, middle-class shoppers, or factory workers, depending on which area the news people select. Second, television interviews tend to attract outgoing people who are willing to appear on the air, while they frighten away others who may feel intimidated by a camera. A survey must be based on a precise, representative sampling if it is to genuinely reflect a broad range of the population.

             In preparing to conduct a survey, sociologists must exercise great care in the wording of questions. An effect survey question must be simple and clear enough for people to understand it. I must also be specific enough so that there are no problems in interpreting the results. Even questions that are less structured must be carefully phrased in order to elicit the type of information desired. Surveys can be indispensable sources of information, but only if the sampling is done properly and the questions are worded accurately.

             There are two main forms of surveys: the interview and the questionnaire. Each of these forms of survey research has its advantages. An interviewer can obtain a high response rate because people find it more difficult to turn down a personal request for an interview than to throw away a written questionnaire. In addition, an interview can go beyond written questions and probe for a subject’s underlying feelings and reasons. However, questionnaires have the advantage of being cheaper and more consistent.

What does the passage mainly discuss?

The word “they” in line 7 refers to

According to the passage, the main disadvantage of the person-on-the-street interviews is that they

The word “precise” in line 10 is closest in meaning to

According to paragraph 3, which of the following is most important for an effective survey?

The word “exercise” in line 13 is closest in meaning to

It can be inferred from the passage that one reason that sociologists may become frustrated with questionnaire is that

According to the passage, one advantage of live interviews over questionnaires is that live interviews

In the United States in the early 1800's, individual state governments had more effect on the economy than did the federal government. States chartered manufacturing, banking, mining, and transportation firms and participated in the construction of various internal improvements such as canals, turnpikes, and railroads. The states encouraged internal improvements in two distinct ways; first, by actually establishing state companies to build such improvement; second, by providing part of the capital for mixed public-private companies setting out to make a profit.

In the early nineteenth century, state governments also engaged in a surprisingly large amount of direct regulatory activity, including extensive licensing and inspection programs. Licensing targets reflected both similarities in and differences between the economy of the nineteenth century and that of today: in the nineteenth century, state regulation through licensing fell especially on peddlers, innkeepers, and retail merchants of various kinds. The perishable commodities of trade generally came under state inspection, and such important frontier staples as lumber and gunpowder were also subject to state control. Finally, state governments experimented with direct labor and business regulation designed to help the individual laborer or consumer, including setting maximum limits on hours of work and restrictions on price-fixing by businesses.

Although the states dominated economic activity during this period, the federal government was not inactive. Its goals were the facilitation of western settlement and the development of native industries. Toward these ends the federal government pursued several courses of action. It established a national bank to stabilize banking activities in the country and, in part, to provide a supply of relatively easy money to the frontier, where it was greatly needed for settlement. It permitted access to public western lands on increasingly easy terms, culminating in the Homestead Act of 1862, by which title to land could be claimed on the basis of residence alone. Finally, it set up a system of tariffs that was basically protectionist in effect, although maneuvering for position by various regional interests produced frequent changes in tariff rates throughout the nineteenth century.

What does the passage mainly discuss?

All of the following are mentioned in the passage as areas that involved state

governments in the nineteenth century EXCEPT

It can be inferred from the first paragraph that in the nineteenth century canals

and railroads were

The regulatory activities of state governments included all of the following

EXCEPT

The word “ends” in line 20 is closest in meaning to

According to the passage, which of the following is true of the

Homestead Act of 1862?

Which of the following activities was the responsibility of the federal

government in the nineteenth century?

What we today call American folk art was, indeed, art of, by, and for ordinary, everyday “folks” who, with increasing prosperity and leisure, created a market for art of all kinds, and especially for portraits. Citizens of prosperous, essentially middle-class republics — whether ancient Romans, seventeenth-century Dutch burghers, or nineteenth-century Americans — have always shown a marked taste for portraiture. Starting in the late eighteenth century, the United States contained increasing numbers of such people, and of the artists who could meet their demands. The earliest American folk art portraits come, not surprisingly, from New England — especially Connecticut and Massachusetts — for this was a wealthy and populous region and the center of a strong craft tradition. Within a few decades after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the population was pushing westward, and portrait painters could be found at work in western New York, Ohio,

Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri. Midway through its first century as a nation, the United States' population had increased roughly five times, and eleven new states had been added to the original thirteen. During these years the demand for portraits grew and grew eventually to be satisfied by the camera. In 1839 the daguerreotype was introduced to America, ushering in the age of photography, and within a generation the new invention put an end to the popularity of painted portraits. Once again an original portrait became a luxury, commissioned by the wealthy and executed by the professional.

But in the heyday of portrait painting — from the late eighteenth century until the

1850's — anyone with a modicum of artistic ability could become a limner, as such a portraitist was called. Local craftspeople — sign, coach, and house painters — began to paint portraits as a profitable sideline; sometimes a talented man or woman who began by sketching family members gained a local reputation and was besieged with requests for portraits; artists found it worth their while to pack their paints, canvases, and brushes and to travel the countryside, often combining house decorating with portrait painting.

In lines 4-5 the author mentions seventeenth-century Dutch burghers as an example of a group that

According to the passage, where were many of the first American folk art portraits painted?

How much did the population of the United States increase in the first fifty

years following independence?

The phrase “ushering in” in line 17 is closest in meaning to

The relationship between the daguerreotype (line 16) and the painted portrait is

similar to the relationship between the automobile and the

According to the passage, which of the following contributed to a decline in the

demand for painted portrait?

The author implies that most limners (line 22)

The phrase “worth their while” in line 26 is closest in meaning to