| 1 |
Philadelphia is a city known for
many things. It is where the Declaration of independence was signed in 1776,
and it was also the first capital of the United States. But one fact about Philadelphia
is not so well-known: it is home to nearly 3,000 murals painted on the sides of
homes and buildings around the city. In fact, it is said that Philadelphia has
more murals than any other city in the world, with the exception of Rome. How
did this come to be?
More than 20 years ago, a New
Jersey artist named Jane Golden started a program pairing troubled youth with
artists to paint murals on a few buildings around the city. Form this small
project, something magical happened. The young people involved helped to create
magnificent pieces of art, but there were other, perhaps more important
benefits. The young people learned to collaborate and get along with many
different kinds of people during the various steps required to paint and design
a mural. They learned to be responsible, because they needed to follow a
schedule to make sure the murals were completed. They also learned to take pride
in their community. It is hard for any resident to see the spectacular designs
and not feel proud to be a part of Philadelphia.
Take a walk around some of the
poorest neighborhoods I Philadelphia, neighborhoods full of broken windows and
littered front steps, and you will find beautiful works of art on the sides and
fronts of buildings. Of course they murals are not just in poor neighborhoods,
but more affluent ones as well. Special buses take tourists to different parts
of the city to see the various murals, which range from huge portraits of
historical heroes, to cityscapes, to scenes depicting the diverse ethnic groups
that call Philadelphia home.
As a result of its success, the
mural program created by Jane Golden has now become the nation’s largest public
art program and a model for to troubled youth.
As used in paragraph 3, which is
the best definition of affluent
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A. Popular
B. Clean
C. Well known
D. Wealthy
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| 2 |
On which project will the author need to use the most tools?
|
A. fixing the washing machine
B. fixing the back porch
C. both projects need the same number of tools
D. neither project needs any tools
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| 3 |
When her grandmother’s health began to deteriorate in the
fall of 1994, Mary would make the drive from Washington, DC to Winchester every
few days.
She hated highway driving, finding it ugly and monotonous. She
preferred to take meandering back roads to her grandmother’s hospital. When she
drove through the rocky town of Harpers Ferry, the beauty of the rough waters
churning at the intersection of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers always
captivated her.
Toward the end of her journey, Mary had to get on highway
81. It was here that she discovered a surprising bit of beauty during one of
her trips. Along the median of the highway, there was a long stretch of
wildflowers. They were thin and delicate and purple, and swayed in the wind as
if whispering poems to each other.
The first time she saw the flowers, Mary was seized by an uncontrollable
urge to pull over on the highway and yank a bunch from the soil. She carried
them into her grandmother’s room when she arrived at the hospital and placed
them in a water pitcher by her bed. For a moment her grandmother seemed more
lucid than usual. She thanked Mary for the flowers, commented on their beauty
and asked where she had gotten them. Mary was overjoyed by the ability of the
flowers to wake something up inside her ailing grandmother.
Afterwards, Mary began carrying scissors in the car during
her trips to visit her grandmother. She would quickly glide onto the shoulder,
jump out of the car, and clip a bunch of flowers. Each time Mary placed the
flowers in the pitcher, her grandmother’s eyes would light up and they would
have a splendid conversation.
One morning in late October, Mary got a call that her
grandmother had taken a turn for the worse. Mary was in such a hurry to get to
her grandmother that she sped past her flower spot. She decided to turn around
head several miles back, and cut a bunch. Mary arrived at the hospital to find her
grandmother very weak and unresponsive. She placed flowers in the pitcher and
sat down. She felt a squeeze on her fingers. It was the last conversation they
had.
“They were thin and delicate and purple, and swayed in the
wind as if whispering poems to each other.”
Which of the following literary techniques is used in the
above sentence?
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A. Vernacular, suggesting the dialect of a particular geographical area
B. Assonance, characterized by the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds in successive words
C. Foreshadowing, characterized by the use of hints to suggest what is to come
D. Personification, characterized by a thing or object being endowed with human qualities
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| 4 |
Chocolate – there’s nothing quite like it, is there?
Chocolate is simply delicious. What is chocolate? Where does it come from?
Christopher Columbus was probably the first to take cacao
beans from the New World to Europe in around 1502. But the history of chocolate
goes back at least 4,000 years! The Aztecs, who lived in America, through that
their bitter cacao drink was a divine gift from heaven. In fact, the scientist
Carolus Linnaeus named the plant Theobroma, which means “food of the gods”
The Spanish explorer Hernando Cortex went to America in
1519. He visited the Mexican emperor Montezuma. He saw that Montezuma drank
cacao mixed with vanilla and spices. Cortez took some cacao home as a gift to the
Spanish King Charles. In Spain, people began to drink Cortez’s chocolate in
drink with chili peppers. However, the natural taste of cacao was too bitter
for most people. To sweeten the drink, Europeans added sugar to the cacao
drink. As a sweet drink, it became more popular. By the 17th
century, rich people in Europe were drinking it.
Later, people started using chocolate in pastries, like pies and cakes. In 1828, Dutch chocolate
makers started using a new process for removing the fat from cacao beans, and
getting to the center of the cacao bean. The Dutch chocolate maker Conrad J.
Van Houten made a machine that pressed the fat from the bean. The resulting powder
mixed better with water than cacao did. Now, some call van Houten’s chocolate “Dutch
chocolate.”
It was easy to mix Dutuch chocolate powder with sugar. So
other chocolate makers started trying new recipes that used powdered chocolate. People started
mixing sweetened chocolate with cocoa butter to make solid chocolate bars. In
1849, an English chocolate maker made the first chocolate bar. In the 19th
century, the Swiss started making milk chocolate by mixing powdered milk with
sweetened chocolate. Milk chocolate has not changed much since this process was
invented.
Today, two countries – Brazil and Ivory Coast – account for
almost half the world’s chocolate. The United States imports most of the
chocolate in the world, but the Swiss eat the most chocolate per person. The
most chocolate eaten today is sweet milk chocolate, but people also eat white
chocolate and dark chocolate.
Cocoa and dark chocolate are believed to help prevent heart
attacks, or help keep from happening. They are supposed to be good for the
circulatory system. On the other hand, the high fat content of chocolate can
cause weight gain, which is not good for people’s health. Other health claims
for chocolate have not been proven, but some research shows that chocolate
could be good for the brain.
Chocolate is a popular holiday gift. A popular Valentine’s
Day gift is a box of chocolate candies with a card and flowers. Chocolate is
sometimes given for Christmas and birthdays. Chocolate eggs are sometimes given
at Easter.
Chocolate is toxic to some animals. An ingredient in chocolate
is poisonous to dogs, cats, parrots, small rodents, and some livestock. Their
bodies cannot process some if the chemicals found in chocolate. Therefore, they
should never be fed chocolate.
How did people first consume chocolate?
|
A. As a sweet drink
B. As a bitter drink
C. As a chocolate bar
D. In cakes and pastries
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| 5 |
At the time Jane Austen’s novels
were published – between 1811 and 1818 – English literature was not part of any
academic curriculum. In addition, fiction was under strenuous attack. Certain
religious and political groups felt novels had the power to make so-called
immoral characters so interesting that young readers would identify with them;
these groups also considered novels to be of little practical use. Even
Coleridge, certainly no literary reactionary, spoke for many when the asserted
that “novel-reading occasions the destruction of the mind’s powers.”
These attitudes towards novels help
explain why Austen received little attention from early nineteenth-century
literary cities. (In any case a novelist published anonymously, as Austen was,
would not be likely to receive much critical attention.) The literary response
that was accorded to her, however, was often as incisive as twentieth-century
criticism. In his attack in 1816 on novelistic portrayals “outside of ordinary experience,”
for example. Scott made an insightful remark about the merits of Austen’s
fiction.
Her novels, wrote Scott, “present to
the reader an accurate and exact picture of ordinary everyday people and
places, reminiscent of seventeenth-century Flemish painting.” Scott did not use
the word ‘realism’, but he undoubtedly used a standard of realistic probability
in judging novels. The critic Whately did not use the word ‘realism’, either,
but he expressed agreement with Scott’s evaluation, and went on to suggest the possibilities
for moral instruction in what we have called Austen’s ‘realistic method’ her
characters, wrote Whately, are persuasive agents for moral truth since they are
ordinary persons “so clearly evoked that we feel an interest in their fate as
if it were our own.” Moral instruction, explained Whately, is more likely to be
effective when conveyed through recongnizably human and interesting characters
than when imparted by a sermonizing narrator. Whitely especially praised Austen’s
ability to create character who “mingle goodness and villainy, weakness and
virtue, as in life they are always mingled. “Whitely concluded his remarks by
comparing Austen’s art of characterization to Dickens’, starting his preference
for Austen’s.
Yet, the response of
nineteenth-century literary critics to Austen was not always so laudatory, and
often anticipated the reservations of twentieth-century literary critics. An
example of such a response was Lewes complaint in 1859 that Austen’s range of
subject and characters was too narrow. Praising her verisimilitude, Lewes added
that, nonetheless her focus was too often only upon the unlofty and the
commonplace. (Twentieth-century Marxists, on the other hand, were to complain
about what they saw as her exclusive emphasis on a lofty upper middle class.)
In any case having being rescued by literary critics from neglect and indeed
gradually lionized by them, Austen steadily reached, by the mid-nineteenth
century, the enviable pinnacle of being considered controversial.
The primary purpose of the passage
is to
|
A. Demonstrate the nineteenth-century preference for realistic novels rather than romantic ones
B. Explain why Jane Austen's novel were not included in any academic curriculum in the early nineteenth century?
C. Urge a reassessment of Jane Austen's novels by twentieth-century literary critics
D. Describe some of the responses of nineteenth-century critics to Jane Austen's novels as well as fiction in general
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| 6 |
Recent advances in science and technology have made it
possible for geneticists to find out abnormalities in the unborn foetus and
take remedial action to rectify some defects which would otherwise prove to be
fatal to the child. Though genetic engineering is still at its infancy,
scientists can now predict with greater accuracy a genetic disorder. It is not
yet an exact science since they are not in a position to predict when exactly a
genetic disorder will set in. While they have not yet been able to change the
genetic order of the gene in germs, they are optimistic and are holding out
that in the near future they might be successful in achieving this feat. They
have, however, acquired the ability in manipulating tissue cells. However,
genetic mis-information can sometimes be damaging for it may adversely affect
people psychologically. Genetic information may lead to a tendency to brand
some people as inferiors. Genetic information can therefore be abused and its
application in deciding the sex of the foetus and its subsequent abortion is
now hotly debated on ethical lines. But on this issue geneticists cannot be
squarely blamed though this charge has often been leveled at them. It is mainly
a societal problem. At present genetic engineering is a costly process of
detecting disorders but scientists hope to reduce the costs when technology
becomes more advanced. This is why much progress in this area has been possible
in scientifically advanced and rich countries like the U.S.A., U.K. and Japan.
It remains to be seen if in the future this science will lead to the
development of a race of supermen or will be able to obliterate disease from
this world.
Which of the following is the same in meaning as the word ‘feat’
as used in the passage?
|
A. Process
B. Focus
C. Fact
D. Goal
|
| 7 |
It is easy to make delicious-looking hamburger at home. But would this
hamburger still look delicious after it sat on your kitchen table under very
bright lights for six or seven hours? if someone took a picture or made a video
of this hamburger after the seventh hour, would anyone want to eat it? More
importantly, do you think you could get millions of people to pay money for
this hamburger? These are the questions that fast food companies worry about
when they produce commercials or print ads for their products. Video and photo
shoots often last many hours. The lights that the photographers use can be
extremely hot. These conditions can cause the food to look quite unappealing to
potential consumers. Because of this, the menu items that you see in fast food
commercials are probably not actually edible.Let's use the hamburger as an
example. The first step towards building the commercial hamburger is the bun.
The food stylist--a person employed by the company to make sure the products
look perfect--sorts through hundreds of buns until he or she finds one with no
wrinkles. Next, the stylist carefully rearranges the sesame seeds on the bun
using glue and tweezers for maximum visual appeal. The bun is then sprayed with
a waterproofing solution so that it will no get soggy from contact with other
ingredients, the lights, or the humidity in the room.Next, the food stylist
shapes a meat patty into a perfect circle. Only the outside of the meat gets
cooked-the inside is left raw so that the meat remains moist. The food stylist
then paints the outside of the meat patty with a mixture of oil, molasses, and
brown food coloring. Grill marks are either painted on or seared into the meat
using hot metal skewers.Finally, the food stylist searches through dozens of
tomatoes and heads of lettuce to find the best-looking produce.One leaf of the
crispest lettuce and one center slice of the reddest tomato are selected and
then sprayed with glycerin to keep them looking fresh. So the next time you see
a delectable hamburger in a fast food commercial, remember: you are actually
looking at glue, paint, raw meat , and glycerin. Are you still hungry? Question: Something is edible of it
|
A. can safely be eaten
B. looks very delicious
C. seems much smaller in real life
D. tastes good
|
| 8 |
Yellowstone National Park is the
U.S. States of Wyoming, Idaho and Montana. It became the first National Park in
1872. There are geysers and hot springs at Yellowstone. There are also many
animals at Yellowstone. There are elk, bison, sheep, grizzly, black bears,
moose, coyotes, and more.
More than 3 million people visit
Yellowstone National Park year. During the winter, visitors can ski or go
snowmobiling there. There are also snow coaches that give tours. Visitors can
see steam (vapor water) come from the geysers. During
other seasons, visitors can go boating or fishing. People can ride horses
there. There are nature trails and tours. Most visitors want to see Old
Faithful, a very predictable geyser at
Yellowstone Visitors can check a schedule to see the exact time that Old
Faithful is going to erupt. There are many other geysers and boiling springs in
the area. Great Fountain Geyser erupts every 11 hours. Excelsior Geyser
produces 4,000 gallons of boiling water each minute! Boiling water is 100
degrees Celsius, or 212 degrees Fahrenheit – that’s very hot! People also like
to see the Grand Prismatic Spring. It is the largest hot spring in the park. It
has many beautiful colors. The beautiful colors are caused by bacteria in the water. These are forms of life that
have only one cell. Different bacteria live in different water temperatures. Visiting Yellowstone National Park can be a week
– long vacation or more. It is beautiful and there are activities for everyone.
Steam is
|
A. Snow
B. Running water.
C. Freezing water
D. Water in vapor form
|
| 9 |
Recent advances in science and technology have made it
possible for geneticists to find out abnormalities in the unborn foetus and
take remedial action to rectify some defects which would otherwise prove to be
fatal to the child. Though genetic engineering is still at its infancy,
scientists can now predict with greater accuracy a genetic disorder. It is not
yet an exact science since they are not in a position to predict when exactly a
genetic disorder will set in. While they have not yet been able to change the
genetic order of the gene in germs, they are optimistic and are holding out
that in the near future they might be successful in achieving this feat. They
have, however, acquired the ability in manipulating tissue cells. However,
genetic mis-information can sometimes be damaging for it may adversely affect
people psychologically. Genetic information may lead to a tendency to brand
some people as inferiors. Genetic information can therefore be abused and its
application in deciding the sex of the foetus and its subsequent abortion is
now hotly debated on ethical lines. But on this issue geneticists cannot be
squarely blamed though this charge has often been leveled at them. It is mainly
a societal problem. At present genetic engineering is a costly process of
detecting disorders but scientists hope to reduce the costs when technology
becomes more advanced. This is why much progress in this area has been possible
in scientifically advanced and rich countries like the U.S.A., U.K. and Japan.
It remains to be seen if in the future this science will lead to the
development of a race of supermen or will be able to obliterate disease from
this world.
What is the tone of the
author in the last sentence of the passage?
|
A. Resignation
B. Cautious
C. Relief
D. Concert
|
| 10 |
The year 2006 was the golden
anniversary, or the 50th birthday, of the Dwight D. Eisenhower
National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. This system, usually
referred to as The Interstate Highway System, is a system of freeways named
after the U.S. President who supported it. The system is the largest highway
system in the world, consisting of 46,876 miles (75,440 km) of freeways. The
construction of the interstate highway system is an important part of American
history. It has played a major role in preserving and maintaining the America way of life.
The interstate highway system has
several major functions. One of its major functions is to facilitate the distribution of US good. Because the
intestate passes through many downtown areas, it plays an important role in the
distribution of almost all goods in the United States.
Nearly all products travel at least part of the way to their destination on the
Interstate System. Another major function of the interstate is to facilitate
military troop movement to and from airports, seaports, rail terminals and
other military destinations. The Interstate highways are connected to route in
the Strategic Highway Network, which is a system of highways that are vital to the U.S. Department of Defense.
Today, most of the Interstate system
consists of newly constructed highways. The longest section of the Interstate
system runs from Boston, Massachusetts to Seattle, Washington. It covers
3,020.54 miles. The shortest two-digit interstate is from Emery, North Caroline
to Greensboro, North Caroline. It covers only 12.27 miles. All state capitals
except five are served by the system. The five that are not directly served are
Juneau, AK, Dover, DE, Jefferson City, MO, Carson City, NV, and Pierre, SD. The
Interstate Highway System serves almost all major U.S. cities.
EACH Interstate highway is marked
with a red, white, and blue shield with the word “Interstate,” the name of the
state, and the route number. Interstate highways are named with one or
two-digit numbers. North-south highways are designated with odd numbers; east-west highways are
named with even numbers. The north-south Interstate highways begin in the west
with the lowest odd number; the east-west highways begin in the south with the
lowest even numbers. There all mile markers at each mile of the interstate
system, starting at the westernmost or southernmost point on the highway. Every
Interstate highway begins with the number “0”. Interchanges are numbered
according to their location on the highway in relation to mileage; an exit
between milepost 7 and milepost 8 would be designated “Exit 7.” This system
allows drivers estimate the distance to a desired exit, which a road is leading
off the highway. Despite the common acceptance of the numbering system on the
Interstate highways, some states have adopted different numbering systems. For
example, a portion of the Interstate 19 in Arizona is measured in kilometers
instead of miles since the highway goes south to Mexico.
Since the Interstate highways are
freeways-highways that do not have signs and cross streets – they have the
highest speed limits in the nation. Most interstate highways have speed limits
between 65 – 75 miles per hour (105 – 120 kilometers per hour), but some areas
in Texas and Utah have an 80 mile-per-hour (130 kilometer-per-hour) speed
limit.
The federal government primarily
funds interstate highways. However, they are owned and operated by the
individual states or toll authorities in the states. The federal government
generally funds up to 90% of the cost of an Interstate highway, while the
states pay the remainder of the cost.
Distribution is the process of
|
A. Traveling
B. Taking up
C. Giving out
D. Producing
|