Đề thi thử Anh Chuyên vào 10 Chuyên Sư Phạm năm 2025 - Lần 3

Read the following passage and choose the best answer for each blank.

Word-of-mouth success - what publishers dream of

'Word of mouth', a phrase that first appears in Shakespeare's play Twelfth Night, is the kind of publicity all publishers want for their books. Positive reviews are useful, but it's only when lots of people start talking about a book that it really 1.1makeshitspushesgets it sales-wise. Word of mouth is what 1.2layranformedrested behind the initial success of JK Rowling's Harry Potter books, for example.

Some publishers will go to any 1.3termsmeasuresextentslengths to stimulate the phenomenon. Years ago, one company paid its own staff to read books published by the company whenever they travelled on public transport. The thinking was that the bright yellow covers would 1.4show offstick upshine onstand out and become the subject of casual conversations among passengers, which would in 1.5turnorderlinesequence boost sales.

With the 1.6outsetadventopeningentrance of social networking, creating word of mouth has almost become a science. However, despite Twitter, Facebook and the rest, publishers still find it as difficult as ever to generate that 1.7hiddenremoteelusiveisolated thing, a viral conversation about a new book that persuades lots of people to buy it. It still seems to be unclear what the 1.8keyguidebaseroot to achieving word of mouth is.

Choose the word that differs from the rest in the position of the main stress.

Choose the word that differs from the rest in the position of the main stress.

Choose the word that differs from the rest in the position of the main stress.

Choose the word which has the underlined part pronounced differently from the others.

Choose the word which has the underlined part pronounced differently from the others.

Read the following newspaper article about technology and personal privacy, then choose the best answer for each question below.

WHAT PRICE PRIVACY?

Don’t blame technology for threatening our privacy: it’s the way the institutions choose to use it.

The most depressing moment of my day is first thing in the morning, when I download my overnight batch of emails. Without fail, it will contain dozens of messages from people who, knowing my interest in the subject, write to me describing violations of their personal privacy. Throughout the day, the stream continues, each message in my inbox warning of yet another nail in the coffin of personal privacy. In other centuries, such invasions of liberty would have arisen from religious persecution or the activities of tax collectors. Nowadays, the invasions take place through the use of information technology.

So, when those of us who value personal privacy are asked for their view, we will invariably speak in disparaging terms about such technologies. In an effort to stem the speed and force of the invasion, we will sometimes argue that the technologies themselves should simply be banned. ‘Just stop using the cursed technology,’ we cry, ‘then there won’t be any privacy issue.’ Of course, things are not so simple. Even the strongest advocate of privacy recognises that technology can offer enormous benefits to individuals and to society. To prohibit a technology on the grounds that it is being used to invade privacy would also be to deny society the benefits of that innovation.

The sensible perspective is that technology does not necessarily have to invade privacy. The reality is that it invariably does. Companies may well argue that customers are prepared to ‘trade off a little privacy in return’ for better service or a cooler and more sophisticated product. They say that this is a matter of free choice. I doubt that there is any genuine free choice in the matter. Whether I go with Orange or Vodafone is indeed a free choice. But I have no choice over whether my communications data will or will not be stored by my communications provider. They know the location of my mobile and the numbers from which I received calls, and the emails I send are routinely stored by all providers, whether I like it or not.

CCTV also gives me no free choice. Its purpose may be to keep me secure, but I have no alternative but to accept it. Visual surveillance is becoming a fixed component in the design of modern urban centres, new housing areas, public buildings and even, in Britain at least, throughout the road system. Soon, people will expect spy cameras to be part of all forms of architecture and design. Of course, there is another side to the coin, many technologies have brought benefits to the consumer with little or no cost to privacy. Encryption is one that springs to mind. Many of the most valuable innovations in banking and communications could never have been deployed without this technique.

The problem with privacy is not technology, but the institutions which make use of it. Governments are hungry for data, and will use their powers to force companies to collect, retain and yield personal information on their customers. In recent years, governments have managed to incorporate surveillance into almost every aspect of our finances, communication and lifestyle. While acknowledging the importance of privacy as a fundamental right, they argue that surveillance is needed to maintain law and order and create economic efficiency. The right to privacy, it is always claimed, should not be allowed to stand in the way of the wider public interest. This argument is sound in principle, but there seems little intellectual or analytical basis for its universal and unquestioned application.

When the UK government introduced the RIP legislation in 2000, it originally intended to allow an unprecedented degree of communications interception on the grounds that the dangers of crime on the Internet warranted increased surveillance. At no time did anyone produce much evidence for this crime wave, however, nor did anyone in government seem to think any was required. It was left to an eleventh-hour campaign by civil rights activists to block the more offensive elements of the legislation from a personal privacy point of view. Such lack of prior justification is a common feature of privacy invasion for law enforcement and national security purposes.

As I’ve said, technology does not have to be the enemy of privacy. But while governments insist on requiring surveillance, and while companies insist on amassing personal information about their customers, technology will continue to be seen as the enemy of privacy.

From the first paragraph, we understand that the writer _____.

The writer feels that some companies _____.

The writer gives encryption as an example of a technology which _____.

In the fifth paragraph, the writer suggests that governments are _____.

The phrase "nail in the coffin" is CLOSEST in meaning to _____.

Think of ONE word only which can be used appropriately in all three sentences.

1. This season we’ll beat other competitors _____ down. They’ve been saddled with enormous debts and an expensive workforce.

2. Cinderella was suffering so much at the _____ of her stepmother that sometimes she wished she hadn’t been born.

3. Going to the pub? It’s impossible. I have my _____ full with Smith’s report due on his desk at eight sharp tomorrow morning.

👉 Answer:

Think of ONE word only which can be used appropriately in all three sentences.

1. Rufus is probably the last representative of a _____ breed of people who keep promises.

2. I’m really _____ to see a good Polish film, but there are none on at the moment.

3. Scholars predict that this species will be in danger of _____ out within five years. So, there is much at stake right now.

👉 Answer:

Think of ONE word only which can be used appropriately in all three sentences.

1. The IMF is threatening to cut off its financial support if the government doesn’t _____ the budget.

2. A sudden gust of wind blew the climber off his _____ and down the steep cliff.

3. The future of the tsunami survivors is still hanging in the _____ as relief efforts still lack coordination.

👉 Answer:

Think of ONE word only which can be used appropriately in all three sentences.

1. It took only five years for the mayor to change the town _____ recognition. Tourists couldn’t believe their eyes how it improved.

2. The thing he liked most about his log cabin was that it was situated in the back of _____ away from the slightest traces of modern civilization.

3. Mathematics has always been _____ me. Even today I have difficulty doing the simplest calculations.

👉 Answer:

Think of ONE word only which can be used appropriately in all three sentences.

1. Unexpectedly, a 16-year-old girl turned out to be the _____ horse in the competition beating 32 other contestants, including some famous names.

2. Cross my heart! I knew nothing about this. I’ve been kept in the _____ about the whole plot.

3. The _____ side of his personality sometimes whispered nasty ideas to his warped psyche.

👉 Answer:

Complete the passage by changing the form of the word in capitals.

Wheeled trolley bags have become an essential item of luggage amongst frequent travellers. The compact version proves particularly 30.1 (USE) as a piece of hand luggage.

Carried onboard aeroplanes, it allows you to avoid the queues at the baggage check-in counters on your 30.2 (OUT) journey and waiting at the baggage carousel on your way home. These days, there are 30.3 (OFFICE) guidelines regarding the maximum size for hand luggage on flights, and these stipulated 30.4 (MEASURE) are continuously subject to change.

Policies also vary between airlines and airports as well as being influenced by your 30.5 (EVENT) destination. The outcome of all this is that travellers are recommended to check out the latest luggage 30.6 (RESTRICT) before setting out for the airport.

What’s more, before investing in a trolley bag, bear in mind that you’re likely to be negotiating 30.7 (EVEN) surfaces as well as the smooth flooring of airport lounges, and that larger wheels are better able to absorb bumps than their smaller 30.8 (COUNTER).

The passage below contains 8 errors in spelling, grammar, word form. The first mistake is corrected as an example numbered (0). Find the other seven mistakes, write and correct them.

Write the mistakes in the order they appeared in the text.

Example: (0) Line 0: has -> have

Fill in each blank with ONE best word.

Time

Time is the fundamental basis of human experience, and it is also the most mysterious. One of the reasons why we have such difficulty 32.1 to grips with time is that it is totally intangible. It is 32.2 like physical size or distance, or like heat or cold, all of 32.3 we can apprehend directly through our senses. In the 32.4 of time we have to depend on changes in the outside world, or on clocks and watches, to inform us about duration. But even with the assistance of such artificial devices, it is obvious that our experience of time is not always constant because there are occasions when time appears to speed up, and 32.5 when it appears to slow down or even to stop. These sensations of the passage of time have a lot to 32.6 with the activities we perform, and how boring or enjoyable we find them. They are also intimately 32.7 with the kind of society we live in, and the subtle ways that it prepares us to think about time and how to use it.

You are going to read an article about an art exhibition that focuses on the subject of whether paintings are authentic or fake. For the following question, choose from the sections of the article (A–F). The sections may be chosen more than once.

Seeing through the fakes

A. Close Examination at the National Gallery looks at 40 problematic works from the Gallery’s collection – including outright forgeries, misattributions, pastiches, copies, altered or over-restored paintings, and works whose authenticity has wrongly been doubted. The curators have taken on a huge subject – the range of possibilities museum professionals take into consideration when they investigate a picture’s status, and the variety of technical procedures conservation scientists use to establish authorship and date. The case histories they discuss have a single common denominator. In whatever direction and to whatever conclusion the combined disciplines of connoisseurship, science and art history may lead, the study of any work of art begins with a question: is the work by the artist to whom it is attributed?

B. A good example is an Italian painting on panel that the National Gallery acquired in 1923, as the work of an artist in the circle of the Italian fifteenth-century painter Melozzo da Forlì. Today, we find it incredible that anyone was ever fooled by a picture that looks like it was painted by a Surrealist follower of Salvador Dalí. But this is to forget how little was known about Melozzo 90 years ago, and how little could be done in the conservation lab to determine the date of pigments or wood panel. Even so, from the moment the picture was acquired, skeptics called its status into question. Nothing could be proved until 1960 when a costume historian pointed out the many anachronisms in the clothing. When technological advances enabled the gallery to test the pigments, they were found to be from the nineteenth century.

C. Scientific evidence can be invaluable, but it has to be used with caution and in tandem with historical research. For example, Corot’s ravishing sketch The Roman Campagna, with the Claudian Aqueduct has always been dated to about 1826, soon after the artist’s arrival in Rome. However, the green pigment called viridian that Corot used throughout the picture only became available to artists in the 1830s. The landscape wasn’t a fake and for stylistic reasons couldn’t have been painted later than the mid-1820s. All became clear when art historians did further research and discovered that the firm that sold artists’ supplies to Corot in Paris started making the newly developed colour available to selected customers in the 1820s, long before it came into widespread use.

D. The flipside of a fake, but capable of doing equal violence to an artist’s reputation, occurs when an authentic work is mistakenly labelled a forgery. Back in 1996, I well remember how distressing it was to read an article in which the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Thomas Hoving, declared that Uccello’s lovely little canvas of St. George and the Dragon was forged. The gallery, therefore, X-rayed the picture and tested paint samples, before concluding that it was a rare survival of a work by Uccello dating from the early 1470s. Hoving was irresponsible not because he questioned the attribution of a much-loved work, but because he went public without first asking the gallery to carry out a thorough scientific analysis.

E. Anyone can label a picture a fake or a copy, but their opinions are worthless unless they can support them with tangible proof. One picture that’s been smeared in this way is Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks. In this exhibition, we are shown infrared photographs that reveal the presence both of major corrections which a copyist would not need to make, and also of under drawing in a hand comparable to Raphael’s when he sketched on paper. The pigments and painting technique exactly match those that the artist used in other works of about the same date.

F. For all its pleasures, the show also has an unspoken agenda. It is a riposte to the mistaken belief that museums have anything to gain by hiding the true status of the art they own. As the downgrading in this show of Courbet’s Self-Portrait to the status of a posthumous copy of a picture in the Louvre shows, the opposite is the case: museums and galleries constantly question, revise, reattribute and re-date the works in their care. If they make a mistake, they acknowledge it. If a respected scholar re-attributes a painting, the picture is relabelled or taken off view. The press loves to publish stories and letters accusing museums of lurid cover-ups, usually originating from a very small number of amateurs who rarely know what they are talking about. But any curator or director will tell you that museums have to deal in the truth, because if they lose credibility, they lose the reason for their existence.

In which section of the article is the following mentioned?

how easy it is to suggest that a picture is not authentic

In which section of the article is the following mentioned?

the fact keepers of pictures frequently examine paintings

In which section of the article is the following mentioned?

information that solved a mystery about a painting known to be authentic

In which section of the article is the following mentioned?

an incorrect idea about the attitude of people responsible for exhibiting pictures

In which section of the article is the following mentioned?

the fundamental issue surrounding research into a picture

In which section of the article is the following mentioned?

similarities in an artist’s style in more than one place

In which section of the article is the following mentioned?

reasons why it is understandable that a certain mistake was made

In which section of the article is the following mentioned?

investigate work that showed a picture was an unusual example of an artist’s work

In which section of the article is the following mentioned?

the willingness of experts to accept that their beliefs are wrong

In which section of the article is the following mentioned?

a picture that would not be mistakenly considered authentic

You are going to read an article about people who make films about wild animals in Africa. Seven sentences have been removed from the article. Choose from the sentences A–H the one which fits each gap. There is one extra sentence which you do not need to use.

Missing sentences 

A. Even while this film of one of Africa’s shyest cats was being shown, the pair were already back where they belong – this time trailing that equally shy animal, the jackal.

B. It can be a rough existence, but the appeal of being alone in such remote areas is that we can get close enough to the animals to become part of their lives.

C. Neither of them regard themselves as the leader, and he says that one of the reasons why they get on so well with each other is that they both see the animals in a similar way.

D. Since then, they have learned to set aside four months on location to gather sufficient material for each half-hour film.

E. In Africa, however, they are seldom sighted at all as they scour the vast Serengeti Plain, their two vehicles packed with cameras, drinking water, camping gear and food.

F. The rest of the Newman-Barrett daily diet consists of pre-packed meals heated and dished out by whoever is at hand at the time.

G. What we are always seeking to achieve is a film that is rich in atmosphere, that brings to life the true spirit of the place and animals, and that will touch people’s hearts.

H. Newman explained that they had to invest in an expensive piece of equipment so that whenever one of their vehicles gets stuck in the mud, Amanda can pull him back to safety.

IN THEIR NATURAL HABITAT

What keeps film-makers Amanda Barrett and Owen Newman away from their home comforts for months on end? The search for the perfect shot.

Of all the creatures to be found in the jungles and plains of East Africa, two of the hardest to track down must surely be producer Amanda Barrett and cameraman Owen Newman.

Their present habitat, the Ngorongoro Crater, has been lashed by six months of almost continuous rain, giving rise to a number of unforeseen problems. 43.1 His working partnership with the talented producer has created some of TV’s finest wildlife films, such as their amazing and well-received film on leopards.

43.2 But this is nothing unusual in television partnerships. Travelling film-makers have been constantly circling the globe, in order to point cameras at exotic wildlife ever since the birth of television.

I spoke to Newman about their partnership while he was making one of his rare and unpredictable reunions with other members of the human race at a safari lodge. ‘We do have occasional arguments but we tend to get over them fairly quickly,’ he says of his colleague.43.3

‘When we are on the move, we have to put up our tents each night. But this time we are operating much more of a fixed camp, and as we set out at 5 a.m. each morning, we tend to make the tea the night before and keep it warm in a vacuum flask.’

43.4 ‘It’s not unusual for us to be out and about for up to eight weeks at a time, so catering does cause the odd panic,’ says Newman.

43.5 ‘I remember once we were filming a family of lions and there was one lioness who would regularly go off on her own. Whenever she returned, she would go round and greet all the other members of the pride, and after a while she made a point of greeting our car as part of her round.’

It was back in 1988 that Newman first worked with Barrett on a film called The Great Rift, and two more years before they set off as a team to film Arctic foxes. 43.6 And before they get the green light, they have to submit a script for approval.

‘Amanda and I struck up a good working relationship from the start,’ says Newman, ‘because it was obvious that we shared the same ideas and overall vision.’ 43.7 ‘I believe if you can evoke an emotional response from people, that is far better than if you appeal only to their heads.’

Complete the second sentence in each pair so that it has a similar meaning to the first one. You must use between THREE and SIX words, including the word given. DO NOT change this given word.

You have to be very patient to work as a primary school teacher these days. (DEAL) 

=> Working as a primary school teacher calls these days.

Complete the second sentence in each pair so that it has a similar meaning to the first one. You must use between THREE and SIX words, including the word given. DO NOT change this given word.

What happened confirmed the truth of Jack’s prediction. (BORNE)

=> Jack’s prediction by subsequent events. 

Complete the second sentence in each pair so that it has a similar meaning to the first one. You must use between THREE and SIX words, including the word given. DO NOT change this given word.

Leila’s interference in her sister’s wedding plans has only caused trouble. (NOTHING)

=> Leila’s interference in her sister’s wedding plans trouble. 

Complete the second sentence in each pair so that it has a similar meaning to the first one. You must use between THREE and SIX words, including the word given. DO NOT change this given word.

You may not have noticed, but Sally is wearing an engagement ring. (ESCAPED)

=> It that Sally is wearing an engagement ring. 

Complete the second sentence in each pair so that it has a similar meaning to the first one. You must use between THREE and SIX words, including the word given. DO NOT change this given word.

‘The company benefits from looking after its customer,’ said the chairman. (INTERESTS)

=> According to the chairman, it is to look after its customers. 

Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.

It’s important to defend what you believe in when others express their doubts.

=> You have to stand ...............

Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.

They only reimbursed us because we took legal advice.

=> We wouldn’t ...............

Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.

It was not until five years had elapsed that the whole truth about the murder came out.

=> Not for another ...............

Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.

I explained what had happened but they totally refused to accept what I said.

=> They found ...............

Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.

It was Walter Raleigh who introduced potatoes and tobacco into England.

=> The English owed ...............

Write a paragraph of around 150 words to answer the following question:

What are the biggest challenges for young people today?