Newspaper publishers in the States have estimated _____ reads a newspaper every day.
In our training session last week, we met our new football coach _____ here from a city club.
Don't you think it's about time we _____?
On the dark corner of the street, next to a row of dustbins _____, whimpering pathetically.
_____, he couldn't solve that mathematical puzzle.
It's amazing how Jenny acts as though she and Darren _____ serious problems at the moment.
If these measures also reduce unemployment, that is _____.
Conservationists warn that whale sharks, which can grow to 20 m in length, are currently in a highly _____ position due to escalating threats that could lead to their extinction.
Before approving the significant budget, the project manager had to _____ every expense item in detail.
Of course not, and not even then _____ the things that Baggio did a week in and week out for Juventus.
The snake slithered out from the bushes, _____ the rabbit that had been peacefully grazing nearby.
After the team lost the game, the coach didn't want to _____ and immediately started planning for the next match.
I'm afraid you may find the truth somewhat _____.
It is universally accepted that a man is known by _____ he keeps.
The concern for human dignity is given vivid _____in the Christian teachings about how to perform charity work.
The license _____ you to drive heavy vehicles.
It is a well-known fact that many herbs are believed to have medicinal _____.
The American habit of having a big breakfast is quite _____ to Europeans.
Damages from the latest hurricanes have been _____ at millions of dollars.
The population in the southern part of this country is _____ Catholic.
What _____ the smoke and the noise, the party made me feel quite ill.
The _____ of the family following the divorce was a great shock to the children.
If you want a job in Italy, you're likely to have more success if you're on the _____ rather than writing letters from abroad.
Few inventors have _____ as many useful inventions as Thomas Alva Edison.
Although he claims to be bilingual, his Spanish is _____, than mine.
In spite of his poor education, he was the most _____ speaker.
- "Didn’t you hear the doorbell?"
- "No, I _____ fast asleep."
That book is by a famous anthropologist. It's about the people in Samoa ______ three years.
I know it’s a big favor to ask but, ______, I’ve always helped you when you are in trouble.
I’ll do my best to finish the report by Friday, but in all _____, it won’t be ready till Monday.
The old woman stood here, _____.
_____ in the next room, her voice is like _____ of a boy.
Carl was injured last week, and the doctor recommended that he _____ in the next match.
I bought my wife a(n) _______ hat when I went abroad on a business trip.
Fill in each black with ONE suitable word to make a meaningful passage.
You can read faster if you wish to, but you will have to push yourself to do it. If you just along while reading, you will make or no improvement in your rate. If, however, you keep trying to step up your reading speed, you will be surprised to discover that you are making . There are several ways to shift your reading speed from low into high .
When you read books, magazines or newspapers, make every effort to read faster, quicken your movement, allow no concentration . If you try and try again, you are likely to see the difference. You may think you should slow down your reading rate or reread certain parts of a chapter of a book to have a better understanding. Don't in to this feeling. , keep up your reading speed until you have finished the chapter. Then, make an oral or written summary of what you have read. Reread the chapter from start to finish but a little faster than before and with greater understanding.
However, you should adjust your rate to your purpose and material. Reading is like driving a car. Your purpose and conditions of your drive decide your speed. You may be in a hurry and step on the ; you may drive at moderate speed to enjoy the countryside. A good reader adopts the speed that best fits his reading purpose and material. Are you reading a history book, a novel, or a magazine? Do you read for specific details, for writing a report or for recreation? All .
Fill each of the following blanks with ONE suitable word.
EXERCISE AND HAPPINESS
There is evidence to show that regular exercise and sport are associated not only with physical fitness but also with a lower incidence of depression. Scientists have been conducting research to discover why people who exercise on a regular frequently report that physical activity improves their mood, making them feel calmer and apprehensive. Explanations to precisely why it is mood-enhancing , with some researchers arguing that exercise may be acting as a diversion negative thoughts, while others claim that it is developing a of a new skill that is the most significant factor.
In addition, it is undeniably true that the social which participation in sporting activities often involves also plays its parts in mood enhancement.
the reasons may be why vigorous activity should have a powerful effect on how people feel, it has been shown that exercise is as potent as any medication depression.
Read the following passage and complete the tasks.
Stealth Forces in Weight Loss
The field of weight loss is like the ancient fable about the blind men and the elephant. Each man investigates a different part of the animal and reports back, only to discover their findings are bafflingly incompatible.
A. The various findings by public-health experts, physicians, psychologists, geneticists, molecular biologists, and nutritionists are about as similar as an elephant’s tusk is to its tail. Some say obesity is largely predetermined by our genes and biology; others attribute it to an overabundance of fries, soda, and screensucking; still others think we’re fat because of viral infection, insulin, or the metabolic conditions we encountered in the womb. “Everyone subscribes to their own little theory,” says Robert Berkowitz, medical director of the Center for Weight and Eating Disorders at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. We’re programmed to hang onto the fat we have, and some people are predisposed to create and carry more fat than others. Diet and exercise help, but in the end the solution will inevitably be more complicated than pushing away the plate and going for a walk. “It’s not as simple as ‘You’re fat because you’re lazy,’” says Nikhil Dhurandhar, an associate professor at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge. “Willpower is not a prerogative of thin people. It’s distributed equally.”
B. Science may still be years away from giving us a miracle formula for fat-loss. Hormone leptin is a crucial player in the brain’s weight-management circuitry. Some people produce too little leptin; others become desensitized to it. And when obese people lose weight, their leptin levels plummet along with their metabolism. The body becomes more efficient at using fuel and conserving fat, which makes it tough to keep the weight off. Obese dieters’ bodies go into a state of chronic hunger, a feeling Rudolph Leibel, an obesity researcher at Columbia University, compares to thirst. “Some people might be able to tolerate chronic thirst, but the majority couldn’t stand it,” says Leibel. “Is that a behavioral problem - a lack of willpower? I don’t think so.”
C. The government has long espoused moderate daily exercise - of the evening-walk or take-the-stairs variety - but that may not do much to budge the needle on the scale. A 150-pound person burns only 150 calories on a half-hour walk, the equivalent of two apples. It’s good for the heart, less so for the gut. “Radical changes are necessary,” says Deirdre Barrett, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School and author of Waistland. “People don’t lose weight by choosing the small fries or taking a little walk every other day.” Barrett suggests taking a cue from the members of the National Weight Control Registry (NWCR), a self-selected group of more than 5,000 successful weight-losers who have shed an average of 66 pounds and kept it off 5.5 years. Some registry members lost weight using low-carb diets; some went low-fat; others eliminated refined foods. Some did it on their own; others relied on counseling. That said, not everyone can lose 66 pounds and not everyone needs to. The goal shouldn’t be getting thin, but getting healthy. It’s enough to whittle your weight down to the low end of your set range, says Jeffrey Friedman, a geneticist at New York’s Rockefeller University. Losing even 10 pounds vastly decreases your risk of diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure. The point is to not give up just because you don’t look like a swimsuit model.
D. The negotiation between your genes and the environment begins on day one. Your optimal weight, writ by genes, appears to get edited early on by conditions even before birth, inside the womb. If a woman has high blood-sugar levels while she’s pregnant, her children are more likely to be overweight or obese, according to a study of almost 10,000 mother-child pairs. Maternal diabetes may influence a child’s obesity risk through a process called metabolic imprinting, says Teresa Hillier, an endocrinologist with Kaiser Permanente’s Center for Health Research and the study’s lead author. The implication is clear: Weight may be established very early on, and obesity largely passed from mother to child. Numerous studies in both animals and humans have shown that a mother’s obesity directly increases her child’s risk for weight gain. The best advice for moms-to-be: Get fit before you get pregnant. You’ll reduce your risk of complications during pregnancy and increase your chances of having a normal-weight child.
E. It’s the $64,000 question: Which diets work? It got people wondering: Isn’t there a better way to diet? A study seemed to offer an answer. The paper compared two groups of adults: those who, after eating, secreted high levels of insulin, a hormone that sweeps blood sugar out of the bloodstream and promotes its storage as fat, and those who secreted less. Within each group, half were put on a low-fat diet and half on a low-glycemic-load diet. On average, the low-insulin-secreting group fared the same on both diets, losing nearly 10 pounds in the first six months - but they gained about half of it back by the end of the 18-month study. The high-insulin group didn’t do as well on the low-fat plan, losing about 4.5 pounds, and gaining back more than half by the end. But the most successful were the high- insulin-secretors on the low-glycemic-load diet. They lost nearly 13 pounds and kept it off.
F. What if your fat is caused not by diet or genes, but by germs - say, a virus? It sounds like a sci-fi horror movie, but new research suggests some dimension of the obesity epidemic may be attributable to infection by common viruses, says Dhurandhar. The idea of “infect-obesity” came to him 20 years ago when he was a young doctor treating obesity in Bombay. He discovered that a local avian virus, SMAM-1, caused chickens to die, sickened with organ damage but also, strangely, with lots of abdominal fat. In experiments, Dhurandhar found that SMAM-1-infected chickens became obese on the same diet as uninfected ones, which stayed svelte.
G. He later moved to the U.S. and onto a bona fide human virus, adenovirus 36 (AD-36). In the lab, every species of animal Dhurandhar infected with the virus became obese - chickens got fat, mice got fat, even rhesus monkeys at the zoo that picked up the virus from the environment suddenly gained 15 percent of their body weight upon exposure. In his latest studies, Dhurandhar has isolated a gene that, when blocked from expressing itself, seems to turn off the virus’s fattening power. Stem cells extracted from fat cells and then exposed to AD-36 reliably blossom into fat cells - but when stem cells are exposed to an AD-36 virus with the key gene inhibited, the stems cells don’t differentiate. The gene appears to be necessary and sufficient to trigger AD-36-related obesity, and the goal is to use the research to create a sort of obesity vaccine.
Reading Passage has seven sections, A-G. Which section contains the following information?
Evaluation on the effect of weight loss on different kind of diets.
An example of research which includes the relatives of the participants.
An example of a group of people who did not regain weight immediately after weight loss.
Long-term hunger may appear to be acceptable to most of the participants during the period of losing weight program.
A continuous experiment may lead to a practical application besides diet or hereditary resort.
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN ONE WORD from the passage for each answer.
In Bombay Clinic, a young doctor who came up with the concept ‘infect-obesity’ believed that the obesity is caused by a kind of virus. For years, he conducted experiments on . Finally, later as he moved to America, he identified a new virus named which proved to be a significant breakthrough inducing more weight. Although there seems no way to eliminate the virus still now, a kind of can be separated as to block the effectiveness of the virus. In the future, the doctor future is aiming at developing a new which might effectively combat against the virus.
Read the following passage and choose the correct answer to each of the questions.
The Amazonian wilderness harbors the greatest number of species on this planet and is an irreplaceable resource for present and future generations. Amazonia is crucial for maintaining global climate and genetic resources, and its forest and rivers provide vital sources of food, building materials, pharmaceuticals, and water needed by wildlife and humanity.
The Los Amigos watershed in the state of Madre de Dios, southeastern Peru, is representative of the pristine lowland moist forest once found throughout most of upper Amazonian South America. Threats to tropical forests occur in the form of fishing, hunting, gold mining, timber extraction, impending road construction, and slash and burn agriculture. The Los Amigos watershed, consisting of 1.6 million - hectares (3.95 million acres), still offers the increasingly scarce opportunity to study rainforest as it was before the disruptive encroachment of modern human civilization. Because of its relatively pristine condition and the immediate need to justify it as a conservation zone and as a corridor between Manu National Park and the Tambopata-Candamo Reserved Zone, this area deserves intensive, long-term projects aimed at botanical training, ecotourism, biological inventory, and information synthesis.
On July 24, 2001, the government of Peru and the Amazon Conservation Association, represented by Enrique Ortiz, signed a contractual agreement creating the first long-term permanently renewable conservation concession. To our knowledge, this is the first such agreement to be implemented in the world. The conservation concession protects 340,000 acres of old-growth Amazonian forest in the Los Amigos watershed which is located in southeastern Peru. This watershed protects the eastern flank of Manu National Park and is part of the lowland forest corridor that links it to Bahuaja-Sonene National Park. The Los Amigos conservation concession will serve as a mechanism for the development of a regional center of excellence in natural forest management and biodiversity science.
Several major projects being implemented at the Los Amigos Conservation Area. Louise Emmons is initiating studies of mammal diversity and ecology in the Los Amigos area. Other projects involve studies of the diversity of arthropods, amphibians, reptiles, and birds. Robin Foster has conducted botanical studies at Los Amigos, resulting in the labeling of hundreds of plant species along two kilometers of trail in upland and lowland forest. Los Amigos has also been a major field site for Robin's rapid identification laminated photographic field guides to tropical plants. Michael Goulding is leading a fishery and aquatic ecology program, which aims to document the diversity of fish, their ecologies, and their habitats in the Los Amigos area and the Madre de Dios watershed in general.
With support from the Amazon Conservation Association, and in collaboration with US and Peruvian colleagues, the Botany of the Los Amigos project has-been initiated. At Los Amigos, we are attempting to develop a system of preservation, sustainability, and scientific research; a marriage between various disciplines, from human ecology to economic botany, product marketing to forest management. The complexity of the ecosystem will best be understood through a multidisciplinary approach, and improved understanding of the complexity will lead to better management. In essence, we must be informed to make wise management decisions about Amazonian forests. These forests hold the greatest number of species on our planet and are an irreplaceable resource for present and future generations. The future of these forests will depend on sustainable management and development of alternative practices and products that do not require irreversible destruction.
The botanical project will provide a foundation of information that is essential to other programs at Los Amigos. By combining botanical studies with fisheries and mammology, we will better understand plant/ animal interactions. By providing names, the botanical program will facilitate accurate communication about plants and the animals that use them. Included in this scenario are humans, as we will dedicate time to people-plant interactions in order to learn what plants are used by people in the Los Amigos area, and what plants could potentially be used by people.
To be informed, we must develop knowledge. To develop knowledge, we must collect, organize, and disseminate information. In this sense, botanical information has conservation value. Before we can use plant-based products from the forest, we must know what species are useful. We must know what their names are in order to be able to communicate accurately about them. We must be able to identify them, to know where they occur in the forest, how many of them exist, how they are pollinated, and when they produce fruit (or other useful products). Aside from understanding the species as they occur locally at Los Amigos, we must have information about their overall distribution -in tropical America in order to better understand and manage the distribution, variation, and viability of their genetic diversity and germplasm. This involves a more complete understanding of the species through studies in the field and herbarium.
The author implies in paragraph 3 that the agreement between Peru and the Amazon Conservation Association is history primarily because it _____.
When the author says that "botanical information has conservation value" he means that _____.
Six paragraphs have been removed from the extract of an article. Choose from the paragraphs A-G the one which fits each gap (1-6). Write the correct letter next to each paragraph. There is ONE extra paragraph which you do not need to use.
Missing paragraphs
A. Once the seeds were sown by the tech companies, other companies wanted to compete with them, and soon realised that they had to come up with more innovative ways to engage employees and respond to what people wanted in a workplace.
B. These results confirmed to employers the benefits of a more stimulating office environment. In fact, employees across all sectors and generations now look for a more stimulating 'experience' at the office. With the average person spending the majority of their waking hours in an office, it makes sense to open up offices in this way. There should be more of an overlap between work, socialising and home environments, many believe, and the new talk is of the 'experience economy' and 'experience design'; indeed, more and more people are adopting it.
C. The rather dull design features of the open plan office are being replaced in favour of plush upholstery, curated bookcases and leafy pot-plants. More space is being given over to socialising to encourage workers to move away from their desks. These features, borrowed from the hospitality industry, are seen as valuable resources in offices.
D. Greater pooling of ideas is just one of the many positive outcomes of people working in offices like these. This is what many believe office working is meant to be; it's about exploring and assisting the intellectual capital of employees to the fullest extent. It encourages and makes the best use of what each employee has to offer.
E. But the frivolous innovations brought in to keep their employees happy water-slides, themed rooms, and so on were not wanted by the more traditional organisations, even though they were keen to change. They sought to introduce more sophisticated stimuli.
F. In an age when so many of our conversations take place digitally, even within the office, the immediacy of a face-to-face conversation can provide greater clarity, prevent misunderstandings and prevent employees getting the wrong idea about what task it is they are to perform. The idea is to stop people working in a bubble and to interact more.
G. These range from the completely private to the deliberately social and noisy. Choice and adaptability of workspaces are key here. The demand is for less structured workspaces, with those involved appreciating that productivity is not necessarily linked to time spent behind a desk.
THE MODERN OFFICE
Long gone are the rows of private offices that were the norm in many companies to be replaced by open-plan layouts that aim to reduce costs and improve employee relations. Offices are evolving, it seems, and the ranks of symmetrical desks, partitions and swivel chairs are undergoing a sea-change.
Areas of informal seating, coffee bars and telephone nooks allow employees to step away from their desks to carry out a task in a specifically tailored environment, while also opening up the opportunity for chance encounters between members of staff.
The concept of cellular working is becoming less required, and the whole nature of mobility, of moving freely around the office talking and swapping ideas, is where and when a great deal of decision-making takes place. And this new kind of workspace definitely encourages collective thought.
A survey of workplaces recently found that more than 8 million people in the UK worked in open-plan offices, but their rigid layouts forced almost 70% of them to sit at the same desk with the same coworkers each day. The survey which covered the whole country and all industries found that these workers scored lowest in terms of innovation, while employees who were offered a broader variety and choice of workplaces scored significantly higher.
To this end, architects and designers are looking not only at the hospitality and residential sectors for inspiration, but also to the technology industry where experience design has played an important role in office design for years. One of the most significant borrowings from hotel design to office design is thinking about the total experience of the visitor from beginning to end, from the moment you enter to the moment you leave.
Another development is that over the past few years, many co-working spaces have opened up, targeting start-up companies and freelancers looking for affordable offices. The variety of users of these shared office spaces has forced designers to create diverse settings within one building.
Workplaces with such collaborative, informal and social spaces are the ones where employees report the highest levels of pride, enjoyment and productivity. And it's not just tech companies and start-ups: banks, retailers and manufacturers are jumping on the bandwagon too.
Read the text and choose the best answer to fill in the blanks.
THE VALUE OF WALKING
New research reveals that walking just 9.5 kilometers (six miles) a week may keep your brain sharper as you get older. Research published in the October 13 online issue of Neurology suggests that walking may protect aging brains from growing smaller and, in , preserve memory in old age.
'Brain size shrinks in late adulthood, which can cause memory problems,' study author Kirk Erickson of the University of Pittsburgh said in a news release. 'Our findings should encourage further well-designed scientific of physical exercise in older adults as a very approach for preventing dementia and Alzheimer's disease.' For the study, the team asked 299 dementia-free seniors to record the they walked each week.
Four years later, the participants were tested to see if they had developed of dementia. Then after nine years had passed, scientists the participants' brains to measure size. At the four-year test, researchers discovered subjects who walked the most had their risk of developing memory problems by 50 percent. At the nine-year checkpoint, those who walked at least 9.5 kilometers a week, had brains with a larger volume than those who didn't walk as much.
This is not the first study to promote the benefits of walking in seniors. For example, last spring, Harvard University found that women who walked regularly at a pace had an almost 40 percent lower risk of stroke.
Read the text and choose the best answer to fill in the blanks.
England's breakfast revolution
The importance of a good breakfast is beyond dispute assorting to health experts, but in historical terms breakfast is a relatively new arrival in England, with descriptions of breakfast seldom featuring in medieval literature. , there are scattered references to travellers having a meal at dawn before on arduous journeys, and to the sick sitting down to breakfast or medicinal reasons, but most people went without unless they were monarchs or nobles.
, in the sixteenth century it gradually became the , not the exception. Some writers have this to the greater availability of food. Proponents of this view have not always considered other profound social changes. For example, new of employment may well offer a plausible explanation for the greater importance now to breakfast, as individuals were increasingly employed for a prescribed number of hours. Often this involved starting work extremely early. Thus, having a meal first thing in the morning was in necessity, and was no longer associated with social status alone.
Complete the passage by changing the form of the word in capitals.
IT'S ONLY SKIN DEEP
We are only animal that chooses what it will look like. True, the chameleon changes color - but not wilfully. Unlike us, it doesn't get up in the morning and ask itself, "What shall I look like today?", but we can and do. Indeed, the (ANTIQUE) of body decoration points to the (CONCLUDE) that it is a key factor in our development as the dominant life-form on our planet.
By (CUSTOM) the physical appearance, our ancestors distanced themselves from the rest of the animal kingdom. Within each tribe this helped them to mark out the differences of role, status, and kinship. Our ancestors apparently developed extraordinary techniques of body decoration for practical reasons. How to show where one tribe ends and another begins? How to (LINE) in a lasting way the significance of an individual becoming an adult member of society? (ARGUE) , without the expressive capabilities of such "body language" we would have been infinitely less successful as a species.
Complete the sentence by changing the form of the word in capitals.
Perhaps the most vivid illustration of our gift for recognition is the magic of caricature - the fact that the sparest cartoon of a familiar face, even a single line dashed off in two seconds, can be identified by our brains in an instant. It's often said that a good caricature looks more Iike a person than the person himself. As it happens, this notion counterintuitive though it may sound is actually supported by research. In the field of vision science, there's even a term for this seeming paradox - the caricature effect - a phrase that hints at how our brains (PERCEPTION) faces much as perceive them.
Human faces are all built pretty much the same: two eyes above a nose that's above a mouth, the features varying from person to person generally by mere millimeters. So what our brains look for, according to vision sciences, are the (LIE) features - those characteristics that deviate most from the ideal face we carry around in our heads, the running average of every visage we've ever seen. We code each new face we encounter not in absolute terms but in the several ways it differs (MARK) from the mean. In other words, to beat what vision scientists call the homogeneity problem, we accentuate what's most important for recognition and largely ignore what isn't. Our perception fixates on the (TURN) nose, rendering it more porcine, the sunken eyes or the (FLESH) cheeks, making them loom larger. To better identify and remember people, we turn them into caricatures.
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
John found it difficult to get used to the fact that he was fired. (TERMS)
=> John had ..........
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
It was rash of Jimmy to react so aggressively that his wife felt heartbroken. (IMPULSE)
=> Had Jimmy .....
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
It seemed the young man was feeling bitter about his family background. (SHOULDER)
=> The young man appeared .....
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
The boys escaped with a stern warning from the police. (HOOK)
=> The boys ..........
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
The diplomat has been arrested because it is believed he has been spying for his government. (SUSPICION)
=> The diplomat ...........
Complete the second sentence, using the word given so that it has a similar meaning to the first sentence. Do NOT change the word given in brackets in any way and write no more than EIGHT words in total.
Proving that I had not been guilty of such an offence was my responsibility. (UP)
=> It was guilty of such an offence.
Complete the second sentence, using the word given so that it has a similar meaning to the first sentence. Do NOT change the word given in brackets in any way and write no more than EIGHT words in total.
The supermarket may be forced to close if demand doesn't increase. (FACING)
=> The supermarket demand increases.
Complete the second sentence, using the word given so that it has a similar meaning to the first sentence. Do NOT change the word given in brackets in any way and write no more than EIGHT words in total.
The employees insisted on being given a full bonus. (SATISFY)
=> Nothing but the employees.
Complete the second sentence, using the word given so that it has a similar meaning to the first sentence. Do NOT change the word given in brackets in any way and write no more than EIGHT words in total.
The doctor’s advice was to just wait and see what happened and the baby would be fine. (NATURE)
=> The doctor said that we should and the baby would be fine.
Complete the second sentence, using the word given so that it has a similar meaning to the first sentence. Do NOT change the word given in brackets in any way and write no more than EIGHT words in total.
His recent behaviors are outrageous. (BEHAVED)
=> The way ordinary.