Choose the word which has the underlined part pronounced differently from the others.
adolescent
adaptation
adulation
advisory
Choose the word which has the underlined part pronounced differently from the others.
quackery
quayside
quadrant
quotation
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.
_____ you didn't come to our graduation ceremony last Sunday?
Schoolchildren are very gifted at _____ nicknames for their teachers.
There will always be a nurse _____ call in case a Covid-19 patient is in an emergency.
We've checked all the answers _____. I feel confident that the answers are 100%.
The first time standing on the teaching platform, I looked down at the _____ of faces in horror.
His sister _____ herself to hold a party to celebrate her promotion.
There is tremendous pressure on families trying to _____ without health insurance.
They bought a number of intriguing books in the book fair, _____ are those written by Haruki Murakami.
I think that it is impossible for him to be financially independent at such an early age, _____?
He found the detective novel absolutely _____ and impossible to put down.
Just give me _____ of the conversion plans for the house and tell me what it will cost.
Reduction in pollution levels could _____ global warming.
These are very _____ times, and people are very pessimistic about how long before things can return to normal.
The planes were delayed and the hotel was awful, but _____ we still had a good time.
Our party chairman is _____ great admirer of the Prime Minister.
Complete the sentence by changing the form of the word in capitals.
A GREAT STAYCATION
Holidays at home are usually a last (COURSE) , when all other options have been ruled out for one reason or another, but in these tough times when money is perhaps tighter than ever before, the grim (REAL) that the stay-at-home vacation maybe the only realistic (ALTER) is one that more and more of us are faced with.
However, this does not have to mean a (MISERY) time in the same old (ROUND) you are in for the other 355-odd days of the year. For those willing to think outside the box a little, there are, in fact, a (MULTIPLE) of possibilities that should be explored. Ever thought about a house swap, for example? The house swap is the ultimate holiday (RECEDE) buster. And there are now websites on which (MIND) individuals, couples and families looking to get a flavor of the life lived in someone else’s home can hook up and start house (SWAP) .
Okay, so it’s not the two weeks in Gran Canaria you might have hoped for, but staying in someone else’s (RESIDE) for a few days at least, whether it be ten, fifty or one hundred miles away, sure beats slouching around at home on your own sofa.
Read the text and choose the best answer to fill in the blanks.
United Parcel Service (UPS) believes that its employees should give the firm a fair day's work for a fair's day pay. The package delivery firm seems willing to give more than a fair's day pay. But in , UPS expects maximum output from its employees.
Since the 1920s, the firm's industrial engineers have been studying every detail by most UPS employees. From their studies have come of every task time and motion standards that how those tasks are performed and how long they should take. Drivers, for example, are expected to walk to a customer's door at a speed of exactly three feet per second. They are told to knock as soon as they get there, rather than time looking for a doorbell.
Work engineers are riding with drivers, timing everything from stops at traffic lights, to wait at customers' doorway, to stairway climbs, to a coffee break. And they are not to pointing out the occasional inefficiency. Additionally, supervisors ride with the least good drivers, noting how they work and constantly them until their work is up to standard.
The of all this work engineering is efficiency, and UPS has been called one of the most efficient companies anywhere. It's also a highly profitable company. Most drivers take the regimentation in stride: many show in meeting the UPS standards each day. Others, however, feel that they are constantly being pushed, that it is impossible for them to at work. UPS officials claim that the standards provide accountability. And, they say, employees who work according to UPS standards should feel less tired at the end of the day.
Fill each of the following blanks with ONE suitable word.
MALNUTRITION GOALS IN AFRICA 'VERY FAR AWAY'
A new report shows that no country in Africa will meet goals to childhood malnutrition by the year 2030. That target was set by the United Nations in 2015 a Sustainable Development Goal. The UN adopted a set of goals, "to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all as part of a new sustainable development agenda". The new report is published in the journal Nature. It identifies poor child nutrition and levels of education across 51 African countries. These were factors in countries battling to children with sufficient food. Researcher Simon Hay said the goal of ending childhood malnutrition was always an "aspirational" target. He said: "This aspiration is very, very far away."
There was some good news in the report. It highlighted the fact that many African nations, Ghana and Nigeria, have shown of improvement in childhood development since the year 2000. However, it is a different story for countries like Chad, Central African Republic, and Eritrea. The report indicates that malnutrition remained "persistently high" in 14 countries between Senegal in the west and Somalia in the east. Many of these countries have war, famine, and mass migration, all of have put massive strains health and agriculture. One researcher said the considerable investment was needed in health and infrastructure in order to address "serious inequalities".
Read the following passage and complete the tasks.
How to Spot a Liar
However much we may abhor it, deception comes naturally to all living things. Birds do it by feigning injury to lead hungry predators away from nesting young. Spider crabs do it by disguise: adorning themselves with strips of kelp and other debris, they pretend to be something they are not – and so escape their enemies. Nature amply rewards successful deceivers by allowing them to survive long enough to mate and reproduce. So it may come as no surprise to learn that human beings - who, according to psychologist Gerald Johnson of the University of South California, or lied to about 200 times a day, roughly one untruth every 5 minutes- often deceive for exactly the same reasons: to save their own skins or to get something they can’t get by other means.
But knowing how to catch deceit can be just as important a survival skill as knowing how to tell a lie and get away with it. A person able to spot falsehood quickly is unlikely to be swindled by an unscrupulous business associate or hoodwinked by a devious spouse. Luckily, nature provides more than enough clues to trap dissemblers in their own tangled webs - if you know where to look. By closely observing facial expressions, body language and tone of voice, practically anyone can recognise the tell-tale signs of lying. Researchers are even programming computers – like those used on Lie Detector - to get at the truth by analysing the same physical cues available to the naked eye and ear. “With the proper training, many people can learn to reliably detect lies,” says Paul Ekman, professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, who has spent the past 15 years studying the secret art of deception.
In order to know what kind of Lies work best, successful liars need to accurately assess other people’s emotional states. Ackman’s research shows that this same emotional intelligence is essential for good lie detectors, too. The emotional state to watch out for is stress, the conflict most liars feel between the truth and what they actually say and do.
Even high-tech lie detectors don’t detect lies as such; they merely detect the physical cues of emotions, which may or may not correspond to what the person being tested is saying. Polygraphs, for instance, measure respiration, heart rate and skin conductivity, which tend to increase when people are nervous – as they usually are when lying. Nervous people typically perspire, and the salts contained in perspiration conducts electricity. That’s why sudden leap in skin conductivity indicates nervousness - about getting caught, perhaps - which makes, in turn, suggest that someone is being economical with the truth. On the other hand, it might also mean that the lights in the television Studio are too hot - which is one reason polygraph tests are inadmissible in court. “Good lie detectors don’t rely on a single thing” says Ekma, but interpret clusters of verbal and non-verbal clues that suggest someone might be lying.”
The clues are written all over the face. Because the musculature of the face is directly connected to the areas of the brain that processes emotion, the countenance can be a window to the soul. Neurological studies even suggest that genuine emotions travel different pathways through the brain than insincere ones. If a patient paralyzed by stroke on one side of the face, for example, is asked to smile deliberately, only the mobile side of the mouth is raised. But tell that same person a funny joke, and the patient breaks into a full and spontaneous smile. Very few people - most notably, actors and politicians - are able to consciously control all of their facial expressions. Lies can often be caught when the liars true feelings briefly leak through the mask of deception. We don’t think before we feel, Ekman says. “Expressions tend to show up on the face before we’re even conscious of experiencing an emotion.”
One of the most difficult facial expressions to fake- or conceal, if it’s genuinely felt - is sadness. When someone is truly sad, the forehead wrinkles with grief and the inner corners of the eyebrows are pulled up. Fewer than 15% of the people Ekman tested were able to produce this eyebrow movement voluntarily. By contrast, the lowering of the eyebrows associated with an angry scowl can be replicated at will but almost everybody. “ If someone claims they are sad and the inner corners of their eyebrows don’t go up, Ekma says, the sadness is probably false.”
The smile, on the other hand, is one of the easiest facial expressions to counterfeit. It takes just two muscles -the zygomaticus major muscles that extend from the cheekbones to the corners of the lips - to produce a grin. But there’s a catch. A genuine smile affects not only the corners of the lips but also the orbicularis oculi, the muscle around the eye that produces the distinctive “crow’s feet” associated with people who laugh a lot. A counterfeit grin can be unmasked if the corners of the lips go up, the eyes crinkle, but the inner corners of the eyebrows are not lowered, a movement controlled by the orbicularis oculi that is difficult to fake. The absence of lowered eyebrows is one reason why the smile looks so strained and stiff.
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the reading passage?
| YES | if the statement agrees with the views of the writer |
| NO | if the statement contradicts the views of the writer |
| NOT GIVEN | if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this |
All living animals can lie.
Some people tell lies for self-preservation.
Scientists have used computers to analyze which part of the brain is responsible for telling lies.
Lying as a survival skill is more important than detecting a lie.
To be a good liar, one has to understand other people's emotions.
Lie detectors can't be used as evidence in a court of law because _____
Why does the author mention the paralyzed patients?
The author uses politicians to exemplify that they can _____
Read the following passage and choose which of the headings from A - K match the blanks. There are two extra headings, which do not match any of the paragraphs.
List of Headings
A. Legislation brings temporary improvements
B. The increasing speed of suburban development
C. A new area of academic interest
D. The impact of environmental extremes on city planning
E. The first campaigns for environmental change
F. A future proposal in unoccupied land use planning
G. The effect of global warming on cities
H. Adapting areas surrounding cities to provide resources
I. Removing the unwanted by-products of city life
K. Providing health information for city dwellers
1.
While cities and their metropolitan areas interact with and shape the natural environment, it is only recently that historians have begun to systematically consider this relationship. During our own time, the tension between natural and urbanized areas has increased, as the spread of metropolitan populations and urban land uses has reshaped and destroyed natural landscapes and environments.
2.
The relationship between the city and the natural environment has actually been circular, with cities having massive effects on the natural environment, while the natural environment, in turn, has profoundly shaped urban configurations. Urban history is filled with stories about how city dwellers contended with the forces of nature that threatened their lives, their built environments, and their urban ecosystems. Nature not only caused many of the annoyances of daily urban life, such as bad weather and pests, but it also gave rise to natural disasters and catastrophes such as floods, fires, and earthquakes. In order to protect themselves and their settlements against the forces of nature, cities built many defenses including flood walls and dams, earthquake-resistant buildings, and storage places for food and for water. At times, such protective steps sheltered urbanites against the worst natural furies, but often their own actions -- such as building on flood plains and steep slopes, under the shadow of volcanoes, or in earthquake-prone zones - exposed them to danger from natural hazards.
3.
City populations require food, water, fuel, and construction materials, while urban industries need natural materials for production purposes. In order to fulfill these needs, urbanites increasingly had to reach far beyond their boundaries. In the nineteenth century, for instance, the demands of city dwellers for food produced rings of garden farms around cities and drove the transformation of distant prairies into cattle ranches and wheat farms; and, the many horses quartered in cities required feed, consuming the products produced by thousands of acres. In the twentieth century, as urban population increased, the demand for food drove the rise of large factory farms. Cities also require fresh water supplies in order to exist -- engineers, built waterworks, dug wells deeper and deeper into the earth looking for groundwater, and dammed and diverted rivers and streams to obtain water supplies for domestic and industrial uses and for fire-fighting. In the process of obtaining water from distant locales, cities often transformed them, making deserts where there had been fertile agricultural areas.
4.
Urbanites had to seek locations to dispose of the wastes produced. Initially, they placed wastes on sites within the city, polluting the air, land, and water with industrial and domestic effluents and modifying and even destroying natural biological systems. In the post-Civil War period, as cities grew larger, they disposed of their wastes by transporting them to more distant locations. Thus, cities constructed sewerage systems for domestic wastes to replace cesspools and privy vaults and to improve local health conditions. They usually discharged the sewage into neighboring waterways, often polluting the water supply of downstream cities.
The air and the land also became dumps for waste disposal. In the late-nineteenth century, coal became the preferred fuel for industrial, transportation, and domestic use. But while providing an inexpensive and plentiful energy supply, bituminous coal was also very dirty. The cities that used it suffered from air contamination and reduced sunlight, while the cleaning tasks of householders were greatly increased.
5.
In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, reformers began campaigning for urban environmental cleanups and public health improvements. Women's groups often took the lead in agitating for clean air, clean water, and improved urban "housekeeping," showing a greater concern than men with such quality of life and health-related issues. The replacement of the horse, first by the electric trolleys and then by the automobile and motor truck, as a prime means of power for urban transport, brought about substantial improvements in street and air sanitation. Campaigns for clean air, however, as Harold Platt and Christine Rosen have written in regard to Chicago, and reduction of waterway pollution, as I have written, were largely unsuccessful. On balance, urban sanitary conditions were probably somewhat better in the 1920s than in the late-nineteenth century, but the cost of improvement often was the exploitation of urban hinterlands for water supplies, increased downstream water pollution, and growing automobile congestion and pollution.
6.
In the decades after the 1940s, city environments suffered from heavy pollution loads as they sought to cope with increased automobile usage, pollution from industrial production, new varieties of exotic chemical pesticides and herbicides such as DDT, and the wastes of an increasingly consumer-oriented economy. Cleaner fuels and smoke control laws largely freed cities during the 1940s and 1950s of the dense smoke that they had previously suffered from. Improved urban air quality resulted largely from the substitution of natural gas and oil for coal as urban fuels and the replacement of the steam locomotive by the diesel-electric. However, great increases in automobile usage in areas such as Los Angeles and Denver produced the new phenomena of photo-chemical smog, and air pollution replaced smoke as a major concern.
7.
During these decades, the suburban out-migration, which had begun in the nineteenth century with commuter trains and streetcars and accelerated because of the availability and convenience of the automobile, now increased to a torrent, putting major strains on the formerly rural and undeveloped metropolitan fringes. To a great extent, suburban layouts, as Adam Rome has emphasized, ignored environmental considerations, making little provision for open space, producing endless rows of resource-consuming and pesticide-and fertilizer-dependent lawns, contaminating groundwater through leaking septic tanks, and absorbing excessive amounts of fresh water and energy. The growth of the edge or outer city since the 1970s, reflected a continued preference on the part of Americans for space-intensive single-family houses surrounded by lawns, for private automobiles over public transit, and for greenfield development. Without greater land use planning and environmental protection, urban American will, as it has in the past, continue to damage and to stress the natural environment.
8.
The core cities themselves, especially in areas of the east and midwest where industries have vacated the regions and urban populations have decreased, suffer from the environmental burdens imposed by vacant, abandoned, and derelict sites. Many of these sites had formerly been used by industries and are contaminated with toxic wastes, which often require costly procedures to remove. Vacant lots and derelict structures in urban neighborhoods plagued by population loss and by poverty, also impose a human cost. In some of these cases, issues of environmental equity are involved. Even though today's environmental regulations prevent some of the environmental abuses of the past, without reclaiming these urban brownfields and improving urban neighborhoods many cities will continue to bear the burden of the environmental sins of the past.
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
Although the beginning may be smooth for a business, one has to think about the worst-case scenario. (PREOCCUPIED)
=> Plain .............
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
Apparently, a lot of employees will be made redundant when the 21st Century Fox is taken over. (HEAP)
=> Apparently, many an ...........
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
Have a look at this picture. It may help you remember something. (JOG)
=> Have a ............
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
Addicts of computer games struggle to distinguish the virtual world from the real world. (DRAW)
=> Those obsessed ...........
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
I would have appreciated it if you hadn't pretended to support my view. (LIP)
=> I would sooner ...........
Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.
It's only a matter of time before you need one.
=> Sooner ..........
Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.
He is certainly not a reliable witness.
=> He is by no ..........
Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.
A child of his age is too young to be deceitful.
=> So ..........
Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.
If Tom hadn't acted promptly to extinguish the fire, there might have been more damage to the house.
=> But ..........
Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.
My new job is much more satisfying than any job I've ever had.
=> My new job is far ..........
Write a paragraph of approximately 140 words to answer the following question.
Online assessments are becoming more common. Do they offer a better measure of a student's capabilities compared to traditional exams?