This precious sculpture was made of a _____ material.
It's too cold for us _____ out.
When I was a child, I didn’t _____ chocolate but now I eat a lot.
_____, no one was absent from the farewell party last night.
She worked here for a while, then _____ afternoon she just quit and left.
This steak is a little bit undercooked for my taste. ____ putting it back under the grill for another five minutes?
Daisy is very _____ to take a test. She has been already well-prepared for the exam.
The _____ of living in cities is higher than that in the countryside.
It is important to _____ the wonders of the world so that future generations can see them with their own eyes.
We regret to tell you that the materials you ordered are ______.
After a _____ hesitation, she began to speak with such a convincing voice.
The weather greatly _____ the outcome of the race yesterday.
He hadn't made a _____, but he got on the first flight he could.
I am not used to the cold weather here, so I need to have a heating system ______.
Many parents tend to make their children study hard in the belief that good education will enable them to ______ in the future.
Read the following passage and choose the correct answer to each of the questions.
Most people think that lions only come from Africa. This is understandable because in fact most lions do come from there but this has not always been the case. If we went back ten thousand years, we would find that there were lions roaming vast sections of the globe. However no, unfortunately only a very small section of the lion’s former habitat remains.
Asiatic lions are sub-species of African lions. It is almost a hundred thousand years since the Asiatic lions split off and developed as a sub-species. At one time the Asiatic lion was living as far west as Greece and they were found from there, but in a band that spreads east through various countries of the Middle East, all the way to India. In museums now, you can see Greek coins that have clear images of the Asiatic lion on them. Most of them are dated at around 500 B.C. However, Europe saw its last Asiatic lions roaming free to thousand years ago. Over the next nineteen hundred years, the numbers of Asiatic lions in the other areas declined steadily, but it was only in the nineteenth century that they disappeared from everywhere but in India.
The Gir Wildlife Sanctuary in India was established especially to protect the Asiatic lion. There are now around three hundred Asiatic lions in India and almost all of them are in this sanctuary. However, despite living in a sanctuary, which makes them safe from hunters, they still face a number of problems that threaten their survival. One of these is the ever-present danger of disease. This is what killed more than a third of Africa’s Serengeti lions in 1994, and people are fearful that something similar could happen in the Gir Sanctuary and kill off many of the Asiatic lions there.
India’s lions are particularly vulnerable because they have a limited gene pool. The reason for this is interesting – it is because all of them are descended from a few dozen lions that were saved by a prince who took a particular interest in them. He was very healthy, and he managed to protect them otherwise they would probably have died out completely.
When you see the Asiatic lion in India, what you sense is enormous vitality. They are very impressive animals and you would never guess that they have this vulnerability when you look at them.
The phrase “split off” in paragraph 2 is closest in meaning to____.
According to the author, the Gir Wildlife Sanctuary _____.
The author refers to all of the following as characteristics of the Asiatic lion EXCEPT that _____.
According to the passage, nowadays we can find the Asiatic lion _____.
Read the following passage and choose the correct answer to each of the questions.
Overpopulation, the situation of having large numbers of people with too few resources and too little space, is closely associated with poverty. It can result from high population density, or from low amounts of resources, or from both. Excessively high population densities put stress on available resources. Only a certain number of people can be supported on a given area of land, and that number depends on how much food and other resources the land can provide. In countries where people live primarily by means of simple farming, gardening, herding, hunting, and gathering, even large areas of land can support only small numbers of people because these labor-intensive subsistence activities produce only small amounts of food.
In developed countries such as the United States, Japan, and the countries of Western Europe, overpopulation generally is not considered a major cause of poverty. These countries produce large quantities of food through mechanized farming, which depends on commercial fertilizers, large-scale irrigation, and agricultural machinery. This form of production provides enough food to support the high densities of people in metropolitan areas.
A country’s level of poverty can depend greatly on its mix of population density and agricultural productivity. Bangladesh, for example, has one of the world’s highest population densities, with 1,147 persons per sq km. A large majority of the people of Bangladesh engage in low-productivity manual farming, which contributes to the country’s extremely high level of poverty. Some of the smaller countries in Western Europe, such as the Netherlands and Belgium, have high population densities as well. These countries practice mechanized farming and are involved in high-tech industries, however, and therefore have high standards of living.
At the other end of the spectrum, many countries in sub-Saharan Africa have population densities of less than 30 persons per sq km. Many people in these countries practice manual subsistence farming; these countries also have infertile land, and lack the economic resources and technology to boost productivity. As a consequence, these nations are very poor. The United States has both relatively low population density and high agricultural productivity; it is one of the world’s wealthiest nations.
High birth rates contribute to overpopulation in many developing countries. Children are assets to many poor families because they provide labor, usually for farming. Cultural norms in traditionally rural societies commonly sanction the value of large families. Also, the governments of developing countries often provide little or no support, financial or political, for family planning; even people who wish to keep their families small have difficulty doing so. For all these reasons, developing countries tend to have high rates of population growth.
In certain countries, large areas of land can only yield small amounts of food because ______.
Which of the following is TRUE, according to the passage?
The phrase “that number” in paragraph 1 refers to the number of ______.
Which of the following could be the best title for the passage?
Read the text and use the word given in capitals at each gap to form a word that fits in each gap.
Adventure racing
The teams that come first are the ones who race intelligently and adapt to the sort of (PREDICT) situations which arise in these races. The teams who do well show both flexibility and (PATIENT) . Unfortunately, our (PREPARE) for the race in Australia weren't methodical in any way. In fact, as a beginner, I was so inexperienced that the training I actually did was (SIMPLE) to run and cycle as much and as hard as I could. When we actually did the race, one of my team-mates became just too tired to continue. We had been going really fast without taking any rests, and he had been (WILL) to ask us to take a break. I knew that our team had not been prepared or realistic about the pace we could keep. Not finishing that race was the most valuable lesson I could have learned.