Đề thi HSG lớp 11 môn Anh Trường THPT Lê Hồng Phong năm 2025

FLORA VERSUS FAUNA

A brilliantly lit aquarium with colorful tropical fish happily gallivanting around may be very decorative and fascinating to watch, but eventually the 22.1 (NOVEL) wears off. I consider myself a patient person, but there comes a point when the 22.2 (CONVENIENT) of siphoning off smelly tank water (which 22.3 (VARY) gets into your mouth when you begin siphoning) in order to scrape green slime off the inside of the glass (I don't care if it is called algae) becomes a bore. Even more daunting is the task of casting dead fish that you've just paid a fortune for into the toilet. Unfortunately, this does not happen infrequently. I must say that looking after my cat is much less taxing and you can't cuddle a tropical fish! So what do you do with a glass tank, which has successfully illuminated that dark corner, when you become 22.4 (ENCHANT) with the fish? Well leave the lights and the pretty poster that you paid an exorbitant amount for in place, and remove everything else including the water.

Some theories of laughter emphasize 32.1 ability to reduce tension and emotion. You have probably been in a tense 32.2 situation when someone suddenly made 32.3 the right joke to defuse the mood and make 32.4 laugh. Laughter seems to produce some beneficial biological responses, possibly stimulating the 32.5 system or starting the flow of endorphins, the pain-killing 32.6 in the brain. Other theories emphasize the cognitive components of humor. When you laugh at a problem, you are putting it in a new perspective seeing its silly aspects and gaining 32.7 over it. Having a 32.8 of humor, however, is not the same as smiling all the time or 32.9 on a happy face." Many women, in particular, feel they have to smile, smile, smile, to put others at 32.10 but often this social smile masks feeling of insecurity and unhappiness.

There are seven paragraphs marked A-G in the passage and 10 headings (i-x). Choose the correct heading for each paragraph (B-F). Write your answers in the corresponding numbered boxes provided.

List of Headings

i. The biological clock

ii. Why dying is beneficial

iii. The ageing process of men and women

iv. Prolonging your life

v. Limitations of life span

vi. Modes of development of different species

vii. A stable lifespan despite improvements

viii. Energy consumption

ix. Fundamental differences in ageing of objects and organisms

x. Repair of genetic material

Paragraph B. 33.1

Paragraph C. 33.2

Paragraph D. 33.3

Paragraph E. 33.4

Paragraph F. 33.5

Clouds occur in a wide variety of forms because they are shaped by many processes operating in the atmosphere. The basic requirements for cloud formation are moist air and a lifting process. When humid air is lifted by rising currents, the water vapor eventually reaches its dew point, the temperature at which it condenses into a collection of water droplets. From the ground, we see these tiny particles as a cloud. If the droplets continue to acquire moisture and grow large enough, they fall from the cloud as rain or snow.

Clouds are classified according to their form, shape, and altitude, and by whether or not they produce precipitation. Based on form and shape, the simplest distinction is between clouds that have a heaped or a layered look. Based on altitude, the most common clouds are grouped into four families: low clouds, middle clouds, high clouds and clouds exhibiting vertical development. Low, middle, and high clouds are produced by gentle uplift of air over broad areas. In contrast, those with vertical development generally cover smaller areas and are associated with much more vigorous uplift.

Among the first scientists to identify the importance of clouds in meteorology was British naturalist Luke Howard, who was also the first to devise a system for grouping clouds. Howard classified clouds by their appearance – heaped or layered – and named the three principal categories of clouds cumulus, stratus, and cirrus. He also described several intermediate and compound modifications in order to accommodate the transitions occurring between the forms. Developed in 1803, the essentials of Howard's classification scheme are still in use today. Contemporary weather forecasters continue to divide clouds into two main groups: heaped clouds, resulting from rising unstable air currents; and layered clouds, resulting from stable air currents.

Most heaped clouds are cumulus: puffy white clouds capped with a cauliflower-like dome created by convection, the transfer of heat by moving air. Cumulus clouds form at low or middle altitudes, with bases ranging from 1,000 to 10,000 feet (303 to 3,033 meters) above the earth. Low-level cumulus clouds are detached from one another and generally have well-defined bases. Their outlines are sharp, and they often develop vertically in the form of rising puffs, mounds, domes, or towers. The sunlit parts are brilliant white; the base is relatively dark and roughly horizontal. Cumulus clouds are commonly known as fair-weather clouds because they usually do not produce precipitation. However, a variation known as cumulonimbus can reach great heights and have dense, glaciated tops that cause heavy rain, hail, or thunderstorms.

Stratus, or layered, clouds appear as large sheets, or strata, with minimal vertical and extended horizontal dimensions. The air around them is stable, with little or no convection present. Stratus clouds spread laterally to form layers that sometimes cover the entire sky, to the horizon and beyond, like a formless blanket. Stratus clouds have a relatively low base. They can be a uniform gray sheet, or a layer of patchy, shapeless, low gray clouds. The layer may be thin enough for the sun to shine through, but stratus clouds may also carry drizzle or snow, in which case they are called nimbostratus.

While cumulus and stratus clouds generally form at low or middle altitudes, cirrus clouds form at high altitudes. [A] Cirrus clouds are detached clouds that take the form of delicate while filaments, strands, or hooks. These clouds can be seen at close hand from the window of a jet plane flying above 25,000 feet (7,600 meters). [B] When viewed from the ground, bands of threadlike cirrus clouds often seem to emerge from a single point on the western horizon and spread across the entire sky. Cirrus clouds are composed almost exclusively of ice crystals. [C] Their fibrous appearance results from the wind "stretching" streamers of falling ice particles into feathery strands called "mares' tails." [D] Snow crystals may fall from thicker, darker cirrus clouds, but they usually evaporate in the drier air below the cloud.

Among the several compound cloud types described by Luke Howard are cirrocumulus and cirrostratus clouds. Cirrocumulus clouds appear as small, well-defined white flakes or cotton patches in close horizontal arrangement. Cirrostratus clouds are a thin, white layer resembling a veil. Because of their ice content, cirrostratus clouds are associated with the halos appearing around the sun or moon.

Paragraphs

A Ecosystems, Raven says, can be whatever you like. Hedgerows in Hampshire are an ecosystem; so are weeds on a railway line at Hammersmith. Savannahs, grasslands, prairies, rainforests, dry forests, pine forests, uplands, heathlands, downlands, wetlands, mangrove swamps, estuaries, oxbow lakes and coral reefs are all ecosystems, and they survive on diversity. The greater the variety of microbes, plants and animals in an ecosystem, the more resilient it is and the better it works for all, including humans. So it would not be a good idea to evict at least half of these creatures, especially if nothing is known about them. But, Raven says, that is what is happening.

B Then you can start with the literature in about 1600, when people began to care enough about organisms to be able to document them well, and for the groups that they were documenting - birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles, butterflies and plants - then you can say, "What was the rate over the past 400 years? It's tens of times or hundreds of times the level it was before."

C Global warming is not going to help, either. What happens to the unique assembly of plants in the Cape region of Africa as the thermometer rises? They cannot migrate south. There is no land south of the Cape. So many will perish.

D As he keeps pointing out, the human species is living as if it had more than one planet to occupy. Forty years ago, he and colleagues tried to calculate the economic cost of exporting humans to a star system likely to be orbited by habitable planets. They worked out that it would cost the entire gross economic product of the planet to ship just twelve people a year to Proxima Centauri or beyond. His message for the planet is, "Think, look at the big picture, and think again".

E But the human population is growing at the rate of about 10,000 an hour, and each human depends on a hectare or two of land and water for what economists now call "ecosystem services" - the organisms that ultimately recycle waste and deliver new wealth to provide oxygen, fresh food, clean water, fuel, new clothes, safe shelter and disposable income.

F Valuable agricultural land is being poisoned or parched or covered in concrete, soils eroded, rivers emptied and aquifers drained to feed the swelling numbers. Something has got to give, and the first things to go are many of the plants and animals.

G So botanists such as Raven begin with the big picture of sustainable growth and can calculate to the nearest planet how much land and sea it would take to sustain the population of the world if everybody lived as comfortably as the Americans, British or French. The answer is three planets.

H There is another way of checking, Raven says, pioneered by, among others, socio-biologist and evolutionary psychologist Edward O. Wilson. There is a logarithmic relationship between the area of habitat and the species that inhabit it. Measure a patch of forest and count a sample of the species in it. Then compare it with another patch of forest ten times smaller. The smaller one will have only half the sample species count. This has been shown in thousands of individual observations, he says. So destroying forests piecemeal is a way of extinguishing creatures.

Peter Raven is a botanist. He knows about photosynthesis, primary productivity and sustainable growth. He knows that all flesh is grass; that the richest humans and the hungriest alike depend ultimately on plants for food, fuel, clothing, medicines and shelter, and that all of these come from the kiss of the sun on warm moist soils, to quicken growth and ripen grain.

50.1

The global population is about to soar from six billion to nine billion in less than a lifetime. Around 800 million humans are starving, and maybe two billion are malnourished, while three billion survive on two dollars a day.

50.2

By many, Raven means perhaps half to two thirds of all the other species on the planet in the next 100 years. There could be ten million different kinds of fern, fungus, flowering plant, arthropod, amphibian, reptile, bird, fish and mammal on Earth. Nobody knows. People such as Raven, director of the Missouri Botanic Gardens in St Louis, are doing their best to count and preserve them.

50.3

Some of these organisms are now being chased to oblivion by human population growth at levels that ecosystems cannot sustain.

50.4

There are ways of confirming species loss, even if it cannot be established how many species there were in the first place. Look at the vertebrates and mollusks in fossil records, Raven says, just for the past sixty-five million years or so. "You find that the average life of a species is two to three million years and you get about one species per million becoming extinct per year in the fossil record. Those particular groups are a small sample, but they are a real sample," he says.

50.5

That works out at hundreds of creatures per year over the past four centuries, and even more when humans, rats and other invaders started colonising islands: 2,000 species have vanished from the Pacific basin alone since the Polynesians got there 1,200 years ago.

50.6

There are various wild creatures that get along with humans and follow them everywhere: cockroaches, fleas, ticks, rats, cats, pigs, cattle, scavenger birds, lusty weeds. These invade little islands of ancient biodiversity, take over, and see the natives off the premises. And not just islands: one third of all endangered plants in the continental US are threatened because of alien invaders, Raven says. In Hawaii, it is 100 percent.

50.7

Ecosystems are not static. They change, naturally. They burn, are grazed or browsed, they regenerate, flood and silt up. But left to themselves, they go on providing services that humans and other creatures value. A mangrove swamp provides a habitat for shrimps. It cannot be improved by draining it for a tourist beach, or building a large city on it. Its natural value would be dissipated. "An ecosystem itself undamaged is very, very resilient, and the more simplified it gets, the less resilient. Globally, what we are doing is simplifying them all, simultaneously, which is a very dangerous large-scale experiment," Raven says.

Facilities that Facilitate
Four young professionals give their views on the exciting new frontiers of working life.

A. Scott
They say it's a brave new world; well in my experience, with all the new initiatives that have presented themselves throughout my career, that's certainly the case. Technology is coming on by leaps and bounds and some of the things that are happening in my office are unbelievable! We've all heard of 'hot desking' - taking turns sharing a desk with others. Well, in my office all desks quite literally are 'hot' desks! My firm installed infrared heat sensors that detect when someone is sitting at the spaces. This data is then collated and analysed to produce reports about how the areas are being used and can be best allocated to workers. This system is interconnected with an app that sends reminders or notifications about usage. So, for example, if I leave the desk for longer than an hour, the app asks me if I'd like to offer it to a colleague! Innovations like this not only make business sense, they also allow workers new levels of freedom to maximise their efficiency and reassess how they use their working environment.

B. Mary
People tend to throw words like 'flexitime' and 'working from home' around as if they are huge luxuries. However, for millennials such as myself, these notions are not revolutionary; rather they've become the norm. For me personally I expect more than just that, or the tired cliché of having a bean bag or a snooker table in the corner of the office. With new methods like working in the cloud and the freedom that wireless connectivity brings, people are starting to realise that we don't even need physical offices at all anymore. Desks, cubicles and even a permanent building really have become antiquated relics of a bygone era. With cloud computing I can store, share and deliver all my work online via a tablet or smartphone. Then, with the touch of a finger, I can scroll through jobs and liaise with clients and recruiters on a freelance basis anywhere or anyplace in the world; as a result I can let my hair down, be productive, effective and, most of all, happy!

C. Paul
I know that some people might scoff at my generation with thinly veiled disdain, but we have to acknowledge and accept that the world is changing and so too are our working needs. Expecting more from a work environment isn't about some ungrateful millennial sense of entitlement. It's about empowerment, and not just for young people but for everyone. I'm glad that my office doesn't have cubicles and instead features open collaborative environments, sofas and cafés. It's great that if I want to discuss something I can just grab a colleague, sit on a soft carpet and brainstorm with them. My company realises that offices need to have a diverse array of these facilities in order to create environments that people actually want to be in. Interaction and communicative exchange are vital in the modern world, and the work spaces at my firm facilitate that and reflect the aspirations of our employees.

D. Jessica
As with all other aspects of our contemporary lives, the concept of the office is rapidly becoming a fantastic synergy between physical and digital elements. With the blistering pace of technological advancements in recent years, both workers and employers have a myriad of choices, and unfettered scope to innovate. In my office however, the focus is now on well-being more than anything else and how to attain that. Ambient mood lighting linked to external sensors, sleep pods, massage therapy and even green spaces and rooftop gardens are all part of the equation and all feature in my workplace. This blend of cutting-edge tech with traditional forms of rest is really boosting our worker contentment and satisfaction. I love having the opportunity to work on my netbook while sipping a latte and gazing out at panoramic views of the city skyline. You see, in my company the emphasis is on developing pride in the workplace and boosting staff retention. After all, with such exquisite facilities, why would anyone want to work from home anyway?