Choose the word which has the underlined part pronounced differently from the others.
dengue
fatigue
intrigue
plague
Choose the word which has the underlined part pronounced differently from the others.
trial
oxide
alibi
elite
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.
According to the forecast, it will be mostly cloudy, with _____ of rain in the north.
The brothers are so alike I cannot ______ one from the other.
The police and army were _____ full alert after receiving the bomb threat last night.
My mother was ______ of making a cake when the front doorbell rang.
They’re definitely not going to call now, so we might _____ go to bed.
Thankfully we ______ another ticket as Jean didn’t turn up.
The Second World War was so terrible, _____ time a large number of families were separated.
_____- collar workers are frequently linked to professions that involve analytical abilities and tasks carried out in office settings.
Complete the sentence by changing the form of the word in capitals.
Papillon: a "must" read
Everyone likes a good "jail-break" story. One of my favorites is the narrative contained in the best-selling (BIOGRAPHY) Papillon by a Frenchman named Henri Charriére about his (CREDIT) escape from the notorious penal colony known as Devil's Island. In this (REMARK) book, Charriére weaves his tale of seemingly endless determination and (RESILIENT) in the face of great conflict and confrontation.
The book spans more than a decade, with the opening chapters focusing on Charriére's early career in 1930s France as a (RESOURCE) safecracker. The book takes a turn when Charriére is arrested for the murder of another criminal - an (OFFEND) which carries with it a sentence of life (PRISON).
Charriére is found guilty and, as (PUNISH) is sent to French Guiana to serve his sentence. Along the way he meets another convict called Louis Dega who makes an (LAW) living as an embezzler and forger. Dega hires Charriére as a bodyguard, but as the tale unfolds, their relationship as employer and employee (MATERIAL) into one of deepest friendship and loyalty. Papillon is a bit of a tome at over 500 pages, but the time you invest in reading it will, I assure you, be well worth it.
(Adapted from Reactivate)
Read the text and choose the best answer to fill in the blanks.
THE TRUTH BEHIND A SMILE
People smile a great deal, and we seem to know instinctively that some smiles are more genuine than others. But is there any scientific for this? Recent research suggests that a mechanism in the brain can help us whether a smile is really heartfelt - or whether it is just being on for show.
to various long-held traditions, a genuine smile involves the eyes as well as the mouth. In the nineteenth century, a French anatomist to prove this. He used electrodes to stimulate the facial muscles of volunteers, creating false smiles. He found that real smiles were always with the contraction of muscle around the eye, but that his artificially induced ones were not.
During more recent research, volunteers were shown a variety of human facial expressions, and the reactions to these were monitored. When they were shown a happy face, 35% of the volunteers immediately started looking at the eye area, checking for tell-tale crinkles that would that the smile was genuine, but when shown a sad or neutral face, they did not. So why did the human brain evolve to between real and false smiles? It could be that this ability to a quick assessment of a smile has an important role to play in successful communication. A genuine smile serves as a gesture of conciliation in conflict, and it's important to know whether we are really being offered a truce or not.
Fill each of the following blanks with ONE suitable word.
Sir Alexander Fleming (1881 - 1955) is with leading the way in the use of antibiotics to treat bacterial infections. His discovery of penicillin in 1928 came at a time when many people died of tuberculosis, diphtheria, and other infectious diseases which made such a cure highly sought after.
After obtaining his medical degree in 1906 at St Mary's Hospital Medical School in London, Fleming began to work antibacterial substances which could be used with humans. He was in the middle of his career when the First World War began, but was fortunate to be able to continue his research while serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He made his first major discovery in 1921 when he identified and isolated lysozyme, an enzyme found in human tears and saliva. antibiotic activity helps to prevent infections.
It was not until seven years later, however, that Fleming became internationally famous. He was working with the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus he noticed that it was killed off by a green fungus, Penicillium notatum which has contaminated the culture. Further investigation showed that there was a substance in the fungus which prevented the growth of the bacteria, even when the substance was diluted 800 times.
The development of penicillin, which derives its name the fungus, must also be to Ernst Chain and Howard Florey. The work of these two men revolved isolating the active ingredient in the fungus so that it could safely be administered to humans. They finally achieved this, and in 1945 Chain, Florey and Fleming were jointly the Nobel Prize.
Since this ground-breaking work, scientists have discovered numerous further antibiotics to treat a variety of bacterial diseases. All of these discoveries, however, are grounded in the work of Fleming, and even today he is up to as a leading figure in the treatment of infectious diseases. Indeed, a museum has now been opened at the Mary's in Paddington, London.
Read the following passage and choose the correct answer to each of the questions.
DESERTIFICATION
Desertification is the degradation of once-productive land into unproductive or poorly productive land. Since the first great urban-agricultural centers in Mesopotamia nearly 6,000 years ago, human activity has had a destructive impact on soil quality, leading to gradual desertification in virtually every area of the world.
It is a common misconception that desertification is caused by droughts. Although drought does make land more vulnerable, well-managed land can survive droughts and recover, even in arid regions. Another mistaken belief is that the process occurs only along the edges of deserts. In fact, it may take place in any arid or semiarid region, especially where poor land management is practiced. Most vulnerable, however, are the transitional zones between deserts and arable land; wherever human activity leads to land abuse in these fragile marginal areas, soil destruction is inevitable.
[1] Agriculture and overgrazing are the two major sources of desertification. [2] Large-scale farming requires extensive irrigation, which ultimately destroys lands by depleting its nutrients and leaching minerals into the topsoil. [3] Grazing is especially destructive to land because, in addition to depleting cover vegetation, herds of grazing mammals also trample the fine organic particles of the topsoil, leading to soil compaction and erosion. [4] It takes about 500 years for the earth to build up 3 centimeters of topsoil. However, cattle ranching and agriculture can deplete as much as 2 to 3 centimeters of topsoil every 25 years - 60 to 80 times faster than it can be replaced by nature.
Salination is a type of land degradation that involves an increase in the salt content of the soil. This usually occurs as a result of improper irrigation practices. The greatest Mesopotamian empires- Sumer, Akkad and Babylon- were built on the surplus of the enormously productive soil of the ancient Tigris- Euphrates alluvial plain. After nearly a thousand years of intensive cultivation, land quality was in evident decline. In response, around 2800 BC the Sumerians began digging the huge Tigris-Euphrates canal system to irrigate the exhausted soil. A temporary gain in crop yield was achieved in this way, but over-irrigation was to have serious and unforeseen consequences. From as early as 2400 BC we find Sumerian documents referring to salinization as a soil problem. It is believed that the fall of the Akkadian Empire around 2150 BC may have been due to a catastrophic failure in land productivity; the soil was literally turned into salt. Even today, four thousand years later, vast tracks of salinized land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers still resemble rock-hard fields of snow.
Soil erosion is another form of desertification. It is a self-reinforcing process; once the cycle of degradation begins, conditions are set for continual deterioration. As the vegetative cover begins to disappear, soil becomes more vulnerable to raindrop impact. Water runs off instead of soaking in to provide moisture for plans. This further diminishes plan cover by leaching away nutrients from the soil. As soil quality declines and runoff is increased, floods become more frequent and more severe. Flooding washes away topsoil, the thin, rich, uppermost layer of the earth’s soil, and leaves finer underlying particles more vulnerable to wind erosion. Topsoil contains the earth’s greatest concentration of organic matter and microorganisms, and is where most of the earth’s land-based biological activity occurs. Without this fragile coat of nutrient-laden material, plan life cannot exist. An extreme case of its erosion is found in the Sahel, a transitional zone between the Sahara Desert and the tropical African rain forests; home to some 56 million people. Overpopulation and overgrazing have opened the hyperarid land to wind erosion, which is stripping away the protective margin of the Sahel, and causing the desert to grow at an alarming rate. Between 1950 and 1975, the Sahara Desert spread 100 kilometers southward through the Sahel.
Which of the following statement is true about desertification?
The word “arable” in paragraph 2 is closest in meaning to _____.
According to the passage, many people’s understanding of desertification is incorrect because _____.
According to the passage, agriculture furthers desertification through which of the following activities:
The word “degradation” in paragraph 4 is closet in meaning to _____.
Paragraph 4 of the passage serves mainly to do which of the following?
Which following sentence is NOT true about the topsoil layer?
List of Headings
A. A designer describes his houses
B. Most people prefer conventional housing
C. Simulating a natural environment
D. Demands on space and energy are reduced
E. The plans for future homes
F. Worldwide examples of underground living accommodation
G. Some buildings do not require natural light
H. Developing underground services around the world
I. Underground living improves health
K. Homes sold before completion
L. An underground home is discovered
| 1. | The first anybody knew about Dutchman Frank Siegmunds and his family was when workmen tramping through a field found a narrow steel chimney protruding through the grass. Closer inspection revealed a chink of sky-light window among the thistles, and when amazed investigators moved down the side of the hill they came across a pine door complete with leaded diamond glass and a brass knocker set into an underground building. The Siegmunds had managed to live undetected for six years outside the border town of Breda, in Holland. They are the latest in a clutch of individualistic homemakers who have burrowed underground in search of tranquillity. |
| 2. |
Most, falling foul of strict building regulations, have been forced to dismantle their individualistic homes and return to more conventional lifestyles. But subterranean suburbia, Dutch-style, is about to become respectable and chic. Seven luxury homes cosseted away inside a high earth-covered noise embankment next to the main Tilburg city road recently went on the market for $296,500 each. The foundations had yet to be dug, but customers queued up to buy the unusual part-submerged houses, whose back wall consists of a grassy mound and whose front is a long glass gallery. |
| 3. | The Dutch are not the only would-be moles. Growing numbers of Europeans are burrowing below ground to create houses, offices, discos and shopping malls. It is already proving a way of life in extreme climates; in winter months in Montreal, Canada, for instance, citizens can escape the cold in an underground complex complete with shops and even health clinics. In Tokyo builders are planning a massive underground city to be begun in the next decade, and underground shopping malls are already common in Japan, where 90 percent of the population is squeezed into 20 percent of the landspace. |
| 4. | Building big commercial buildings underground can be a way to avoid disfiguring or threatening a beautiful or “environmentally sensitive” landscape. Indeed many of the buildings which consume most land -such as cinemas, supermarkets, theatres, warehouses or libraries -have no need to be on the surface since they do not need windows. |
| 5. | There are big advantages, too, when it comes to private homes. A development of 194 houses which would take up 14 hectares of land above ground would occupy 2.7 hectares below it, while the number of roads would be halved. Under several metres of earth, noise is minimal and insulation is excellent. “We get 40 to 50 enquiries a week,” says Peter Carpenter, secretary of the British Earth Sheltering Association, which builds similar homes in Britain. "People see this as a way of building for the future." An underground dweller himself, Carpenter has never paid a heating bill, thanks to solar panels and natural insulation. |
| 6. | In Europe the obstacle has been conservative local authorities and developers who prefer to ensure quick sales with conventional mass produced housing. But the Dutch development was greeted with undisguised relief by South Limburg planners because of Holland's chronic shortage of land. It was the Tilburg architect Jo Hurkmans who hit on the idea of making use of noise embankments on main roads. His two- floored, four-bedroomed, two- bathroomed detached homes are now taking shape. "They are not so much below the earth as in it," he says. "All the light will come through the glass front, which runs from the second floor ceiling to the ground. Areas which do not need much natural lighting are at the back. The living accommodation is to the front so nobody notices that the back is dark." |
| 7. | In the US, where energy-efficient homes became popular after the oil crisis of 1973, 10,000 underground houses have been built. A terrace of five homes, Britain's first subterranean development, is under way in Nottinghamshire. Italy's outstanding example of subterranean architecture is the Olivetti residential centre in Ivrea. Commissioned by Roberto Olivetti in 1969, it comprises 82 one-bedroomed apartments and 12 maisonettes and forms a house/ hotel for Olivetti employees. It is built into a hill and little can be seen from outside except a glass facade. Patnzia Vallecchi, a resident since 1992, says it is little different from living in a conventional apartment. |
| 8. | Not everyone adapts so well, and in Japan scientists at the Shimizu Corporation have developed "space creation" systems which mix light, sounds, breezes and scents to stimulate people who spend long periods below ground. Underground offices in Japan are being equipped with "virtual" windows and mirrors, while underground departments in the University of Minnesota have periscopes to reflect views and light. |
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
Don't run away with the idea that this job is easy. (CONCLUSION)
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 the same meaning to the first.
Margaret is said to be a very good cook. (REPUTATION)
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
The waiters in the new restaurant were very inefficient. (SHODDY)
=> We received ............
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
He got up very early this morning. (CRACK)
=> He ...........
Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.
Whenever you are on a bus, you hear someone talking about snobbery.
=> You can't .........
Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.
You will have to give up the whole idea.
=> You have no ...........
Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.
For further information, please send a self-addressed envelope to the above address.
=> Further information can ............
Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.
Pop stars are corrupted by the adulation of their fans.
=> It's the way ..........
Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.
He had a strong impulse to open the letter.
=> He couldn't resist ...........
Write a paragraph of approximately 140 words to answer the following question.
Is it always better to tell the truth than to lie?