Đề số 23 luyện thi vào 10 môn Anh Chuyên tại TPHCM

6/1/2025 8:30:00 PM

After the spring rains, the wildflowers in the meadow were particularly _____.

exuberant
chivalrous
overcast
ingenious

Ronald had the _____ to blame his teachers for his failure.

concern
chivalry
regard
audacity

His driving license has been _____ on the grounds of drink driving.

repealed
revoked
nullified
recalled

In the eastern part of New Jersey _____, a major shipping and manufacturing center.

around the city of Elizabeth lies
the city of Elizabeth lies there
there lies the city of Elizabeth around
lies the city of Elizabeth

Beaches were ______ as police searched for canisters of toxic waste from the damaged ship.

sealed off
cut off
washed up
kept out

The plague, otherwise known as the Black Death, was a _____ disease.

contingent
contiguous
contagious
congenial

_____, the town posted notices urging people to boil their water.

The pollution of the municipal well has been discovered
The municipal well's pollution being discovered
After discovering pollution in the municipal well
When having made the discovery of the pollution of the water in the municipal well

Losing my job was _____. I never would have found this one if it hadn't happened.

a bone to pick with
a breath of fresh air
a bleeding heart
a blessing in disguise

The Prime Minister will decide whether to release the prisoner or not; that's his _____.

prerogative
derogation
abdication
humanity

Although the patient received intensive treatment, there was no ______ improvement in her condition.

decipherable
legible
discernible
intelligible

We'd all been at school together for 12 years and at our leaving celebrations, we pledged eternal friendship.

assured
pledged
undertook
confided

Food is, after all, an important part of Chinese culture, and mission controllers say it is important _____ China's space pioneers do not go hungry.

so that
make sure
that food is provided for
to ensure that

There are a few things that I don't like about my job, but _____ it's very enjoyable.

by and large
here and there
black and blue
near and far

While Kristie's cake pops are both delicious and artistic, nobody can ______ a candle to her pecan pie.

hold
lit
blow
make

She was in the office all of Wednesday and so has a _____ alibi.

stale
considerable
broad
cast-iron

You are bound to find information on the stock market crash of 1987 in the newspaper _____.

files
archives
records
collections

What stands out from The Voice Kids is that many young children are ______ with natural talent for music.

bestowed
conferred
endowed
vouchsafed

His poor handling of the business _____ on negligence.

neared
edged
approached
bordered

You’d better _____ your knowledge of global issues before the debate.

brush up
patch up
polish off
dust off

On 6th August 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, killing thousands of citizens and almost _____ the city.

overruling
annulling
eradicating
annihilating

That my brother _____ boasts about his achievements is absolutely annoying!

inexorably
incessantly
intricately
intrepidly

_____ the invention of the steam engine, most forms of transport were horse-drawn.

With reference
Akin
Prior to
In addition to

A new generation of performers, _____ those who by now had become household name, honed their skills before following the same path onto television.

no less talented than
together with talented with
along with talented with
having been more talented than

Hoa sat down there, _____ from her cheeks.

tear's rolling down
tears rolled down
with tears rolled down
tears rolling down

We wandered through the ruins as though _____ back in time.

had we been transported
we will be transported
having been transported
we had been transported

The carpenter tried to ______ the sound of the banging by wrapping a thick cloth over the hammer.

rev
survey
muffle
smoothen

This openness and variation in level of the track would have made their walking pleasant ______ the unseasonable heat of the day.

were it without
were it not for
had it been without
had it not been for

The examinee couldn't understand the question, so he asked _____ from the supervisor.

for clarification
to clarify
for clarifying
to be clarified

The way English is taught in Canada is similar _____ the United States.

to these in
with that of
with that in
to that of

When I woke up this morning, the garden looked so wet. It _____ have rained heavily last night.

need
should
can
must

Fill each of the following blanks with ONE suitable word.

Vibrant Vocabulary

Language is a living breathing thing that constantly evolves and changes. If a new word becomes popular, it spreads 31.1 our lexicon. This is becoming especially true in our modern digital age, where technology has rapidly accelerated a linguistic process that in the past would 31.2 decades. Nowadays, for example, thanks to social media, if we share expressions and vocabulary online enough, they unquestionably take on a life of their 31.3 in both cyberspace and beyond! What's 31.4, providing that they get used enough, they could even end up being added to the dictionary, as was the 31.5 with words such as YOLO, LOL, and selfie! Bear in 31.6, however, that even if those words were not officially recognized, people would use them anyway. So, if you dismissed them the first time round, it would probably come back to haunt you! Technology has become the most prevalent factor in people's 31.7 to and use of language in a strikingly short period of time. In fact, had I told you this fifteen years ago, you would most 31.8 not have believed it! Of course, some people might wish that this wasn't so, but it's something that we should all embrace. After all, we had better keep up with new words and expressions or risk being 31.9 behind! With such astonishingly rapid developments, 31.10 the hippest wordsmith might wonder if people in the future will even understand the cutting-edge lingo that's so exciting to us today!

Read the passage below and fill in each blank with ONE suitable word.

A central feature of the 12th and 13th centuries in Europe was the concern of the great aristocratic families to ensure that their landed estates were 32.1 down intact to future generations. In order to 32.2 their inheritance from being divided, it became traditional to insist that their younger sons 32.3 remain unmarried. It was usual for the eldest son to have his bride chosen for him, probably from another related noble family, and if the wife was not 32.4 in producing the male 32.5 needed to carry on the line, she would be discarded, and another bride would be chosen. A potentially anarchic situation subsequently arose, 32.6 loveless marriages on one side, and rebellious bachelor knights on the 32.7. The social problem was brilliantly 32.8 by the invention of courtly love, in which an unmarried knight would swear eternal love, respect and obedience to a married lady. This clever solution killed two birds with one 32.9 by channeling the knights' restless energy into chivalrous devotion 32.10 preserving the noble families' estates. Thus, courtly love not only maintained social order but also added a layer of romance to the rigid structures of medieval aristocracy.

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 33.1 it sales-wise. Word of mouth is what 33.2 behind the initial success of JK Rowling's Harry Potter books, for example.

Some publishers will go to any 33.3 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 33.4 and become the subject of casual conversations among passengers, which would in 33.5 boost sales.

With the 33.6 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 33.7 thing, a viral conversation about a new book that persuades lots of people to buy it. It still seems to be unclear what the 33.8 to achieving word of mouth is.

Read and choose the best option for each space to complete the passage.

… So the time has come for you to fill in your college application form. The best advice is to imagine that you’re the person who’s choosing the applicants and to ask yourself what valuable qualities you – and you alone – can bring to the college in question. 34.1 every justified opportunity to present yourself in a positive light. You must show that you are clear-headed, keen to study your 34.2 subject – and that you can 34.3 your personality. Make the most of your interests – but keep in mind that any you mention may be probed in depth at interview. Hopefully, you can 34.4 a deep, thorough interest in one or two fields. Saying you’ve led a polar expedition is much more 34.5 than saying you like to go for long walks. If it’s true put it down! Remember to say what your hobbies have taught you. If you work as a gardener you will surely have 34.6 ideas about the environment. In a similar way, if you’re a volunteer hospital porter you’ll have gained some significant 34.7 into the needs of the sick and their anxious relatives. Any job may 34.8 deep-seated benefits, even if you undertook it just to earn money. Getting two or three people to check your application can be very useful. And make sure your writing is easy for a poor old professor to read. After all, he may have tired eyes and a hundred other forms to go through.

There are 5 mistakes in the passage. Find out the mistakes and correct them.

Line
1	More and more people are becoming passionate about conserve energy in the home, and
2	this boils down to two fundamental reasons: to save money and to reduce the number of
3	damage caused to the environment. If more households use less energy (or a cleaner energy
4	source), we'll see a reduction in damage to an ozone layer, and we'll reduce our dependence
5	on fossil fuels which are renewable and harmful to the environment. However, for this to
6	happen meaningfully, we've all got to do our part. Living a more sustainable
7	and environmentally friendly lifestyle doesn't mean you have to change your way of living
8	drastically - you don't need to wash your clothes with hand or to sit in the dark. The act of
9	simply taking small steps to live with more awareness help to undo some of the damage
10	already done to the environment.

Example:

0. Line 1: conserve => conserving

Line 35.1: 35.2 => 35.3

Line 35.4: 35.5 => 35.6

Line 35.7: 35.8 => 35.9

Line 35.10: 35.11 => 35.12

Line 35.13: 35.14 => 35.15

Read the following passage about ways of reusing escaped heat. Six paragraphs have been removed from the article. Choose from paragraphs A-G the one which fits each gap. There is one extra paragraph that you do not need to use.

A. But that's not all it can do. Reverse the process and it can cool a home in summer. If the ground is cold enough, it simply absorbs the heat from inside the building instead of from the ground.

B. It's an attractive proposition. A report in 2008 found that the energy lost as heat each year by US industry equaled the annual use of five million citizens. Power generation is a major culprit; the heat lost from that sector alone dwarfs the total energy use of Japan. The situation in other industrialized countries is similar.

C. Yet even this is just a drop in the ocean compared with any heat lost from our homes, offices, road vehicles, and trains. However, waste heat from these myriad sources is much harder to harness than the waste heat from single, concentrated sources like power plants. What's more, it's barely warm enough to merit its name. Reclaiming that would be an altogether more difficult proposition.

D. A more successful way of using the heat is to move the heat directly to where it is needed. A number of power plants now do exactly that. They capture some or all of their waste heat and send it - as steam or hot water through a network of pipes to nearby cities.

E. The system takes advantage of the fact that in temperate regions - regardless of surface temperature - a few meters underground, the soil always remains lukewarm and stable. These pumps can tap into that consistent temperature to heat a house in the winter.

F. While this is not what you might consider hot, it nonetheless causes the liquid to evaporate into a gas. When this gas circulates back into the building, it is fed through a compressor, which vastly intensifies the heat. That heat can then be used by a heat exchanger to warm up hot water or air ducts

G. Rather than stewing in that excess heat, what if we could make it work for us? Throughout our energy system - from electricity generation in power plants to power a car - more than fifty percent of the energy we use leaks into the surroundings.

City of Heat

Escaped heat costs us money and affects our climate. Chelsea Wald reports on a grand plan to capture it and put it to good use.

Deep in the tunnels of London's underground railway, as in many around the world, it's so hot it can feel very uncomfortable. And yet in the basement of a building only a few meters away from the station, a boiler is firing to heat water for someone's shower.

36.1

Recapturing it wouldn't just benefit our wallets. It would reverse some of the damaging effects on the climate. The good news is that several cities have found a way to hunt down their surplus heat in some unexpected places. These cities are building systems that deliver heat in much the same way that suppliers handle electricity and water. Could they point the way to the next energy revolution?

36.2

It was also estimated that given the right technologies, we could reclaim nearly half of that energy, although that's easier said than done. "We often talk about the quantity of waste heat," says David Mackay, chief scientific adviser to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, "but not the quality". Most of what we think of as "waste heat" isn't all that hot; about sixty percent is below 230*C. While that may sound pretty hot, it is too cold to turn a turbine to generate electricity.

36.3

There, building tap into the system to warm their water suppliers or air for central heating. Many countries are encouraging such cogeneration, as it is called. A US initiative, for example, might save the country $10 billion per year. And cogeneration allows power plants to bump up their efficiencies from thirty percent to almost ninety percent.

36.4

As it happens, there is an existing technology that can siphon energy from such temperatures, although applying it on a large scale to capture waste heat is as yet unachievable. Ground source heat pumps have been helping homeowners save on heating bills since the 1940s when US inventor Robert Webber realized he could invert the refrigeration process to extract heat from the ground.

36.5

The mechanism for this is simple. A network of pipes makes a circuit between the inside of the dwelling and a coil buried underground. These pipes contain a mix of water and fluid refrigerant. As the fluid mixture travels through the pipes buried underground, it absorbs heat from the 10C soil.

36.6

This system is powerful enough to efficiently provide heat even in places as cold as Norway and Alaska. It is also cheap. Scientists around the world are now working on the idea that the way ahead is to develop citywide grids using source-heat pumps to recycle waste on a grander scale, from sources such as subways and sewers.

Read the following passage then choose the best answer to each question below.

Hypnotism - is it real or just a circus trick?

Hypnosis has been shown through a number of rigorously controlled studies to reduce pain, control blood pressure, and even make warts go away. But because very few studies have attempted to define the actual processes involved, most scientists are sceptical of its power and uses. That scepticism has driven David Spiegel, a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, USA, and other researchers to take a hard look at what happens in the brain during hypnosis.

Among researchers there are two schools of thought. One claims that hypnosis fundamentally alters subjects' state of mind: they enter a trance, which produces changes in brain activity. The other believes that hypnosis is simply a matter of suggestibility and relaxation. Spiegel belongs to the first school and over the years has had a debate with two scientists on the other side, Irving Kirsch, a University of Connecticut psychologist, and Stephen Kosslyn, a Harvard professor.

Kirsch often uses hypnosis in his practice and doesn't deny that it can be effective. 'With hypnosis you do put people in altered states,' he says. 'But you don't need a trance to do it.' To illustrate the point, Kirsch demonstrates how a subject holding a small object on a chain can make it swing in any direction by mere suggestion, the chain responding to minute movements in the tiny muscles of the fingers. 'You don't have to enter a trance for your subconscious and your body to act upon a suggestion,' Kirsch says. 'The reaction is the result of your focusing on moving the chain in a particular direction.'

Spiegel disagrees. One of his best known studies found that when subjects were hypnotised and given suggestions their brain wave patterns changed, indicating that they had entered a trance. In one of his studies, people under hypnosis were told their forearms were numb, then given light electrical shocks to the wrists. They didn't flinch or respond in any way, and their brain waves resembled those of people who experienced a much weaker shock. To Kirsch this still wasn't enough to prove the power of trance, but Stephen Kosslyn was willing to be convinced. Many external factors could have been responsible for the shift in the subjects' state of mind, but Kosslyn wondered, 'Is there really something going on in the brain?'

To find out, Spiegel and Kosslyn decided to collaborate on a study focusing on a part of the brain that is well understood: the circuit which has been found to process the perception of colour. Spiegel and Kosslyn wanted to see if subjects could set off the circuit by visualising colour while under hypnosis. They selected eight people for the experiment conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital. The subjects were put in a scanner and shown a slide with coloured rectangles while their brain activity was mapped. Then they were shown a black and white slide and told to imagine its having colour. Both tasks were then repeated under hypnosis.

The results were striking. When the subjects truly saw the coloured rectangles, the circuit lit up on both sides of the brain; when they only had to imagine the colour, the circuit lit up only in the right hemisphere. Under hypnosis, however, both sides of the brain became active, just as in regular sight; imagination seemed to take on the quality of a hallucination.

After the experiment, Kosslyn was forced to admit, 'I'm absolutely convinced now that hypnosis can boost what mental imagery does.' But Kirsch remained sceptical, saying, 'The experiments demonstrate that people are experiencing the effects of hypnotic suggestion but don't prove that they are entering a trance.' He also argued that' subjects were told to see the card in colour when they were hypnotised but only to imagine it in colour when they weren't. 'Being told to pretend you're having an experience is different from the suggestion to have the experience.'

Spiegel, however, is a clinician first and a scientist second. He believes the most important thing is that doctors recognise the power of hypnosis and start to use it. Working with Elvira Lang, a radiologist at a Harvard Medical Centre, he is testing the use of hypnosis in the operating room just as he and Kosslyn did in the scanner. Spiegel and Lang took 241 patients scheduled for surgery and divided them into three groups. One group received standard care, another standard care with a sympathetic care provider and the third received standard care, a sympathetic care provider and hypnosis. Every 15 minutes the patients were asked to rate their pain and anxiety levels. They were also hooked up to pain-killing medication which they could administer to themselves.

On average, Spiegel and Lang found the hypnotised subjects used less medication, experienced less pain and felt far less anxiety than the other two groups. Original results published in The Lancet have been further supported by ongoing studies conducted by Lang.

Spiegel's investigations into the nature of hypnosis and its effects on the brain continue. However, if hypnosis is ever to work its way into mainstream medicine and everyday use, physicians will need to know there is solid science behind what sounds like mysticism. Only then will their reluctance to using such things as mind over matter be overcome. 'I agree that the medical use of hypnotism should be based on data rather than belief,' says Spiegel, 'but in the end it doesn't really matter why it works, as long as it helps our patients.'

Kirsch uses a small object on a chain to demonstrate that ____.

inducing a trance is a simple process
responding to a suggestion does not require a trance
muscles respond as a result of a trance
it is difficult to identify a trance

Spiegel disagrees with Kirsch because the subjects in Spiegel's experiment ____.

believed what they were told.
showed changes in brain activity.
responded as expected to shocks.
had similar reactions to control subjects.

Kosslyn's response to Spiegel's electric shock experiment was to ____.

challenge the results because of external factors.
work with Kirsch to disprove Spiegel's results.
reverse his previous position on trance.
accept that Spiegel's ideas might be correct.

Spiegel and Kosslyn's experiment was designed to show that hypnosis ____.

affects the electrical responses of the brain
could make colour appear as black and white
has an effect on how shapes are perceived
can enhance the subject's imagination

In Spiegel and Lang’s experiment, hypnotised patients _____.

needed a smaller amount of painkiller as they felt less anxious.
needed a smaller amount of painkiller than the other two groups.
felt less painful and anxious thanks to pain-killing medication.
experienced less pain and anxiety with similar painkiller input.

What is the main idea of the last paragraph?

The experiment that convinced all the researchers.
Experiments used to support conflicting views.
Medical benefits of hypnosis make scientific proof less important.
The effects of hypnosis on parts of the brain.

All of the following statements are true according to the reading passage EXCEPT ________.

Hypnosis has been scientifically proven to lessen pain.
In an experiment, the circuit showed different results depending on how subjects perceived colors.
Subjects in experiments could not control how much pain-killing medication they received.
The reason for hypnotism is eventually not as important as its actual helpfulness.

Kirsch thought that Spiegel and Kosslyn's results ____.

were worthy of further investigation
had nothing to do with hypnotic suggestion
showed that the possibility of trance existed
were affected by the words used in the instructions