Read the following passage and choose the correct answer to each of the questions underneath.
Today's grandparents are joining their grandchildren on social media, but the different generations' online habits couldn't be more different. The over-55s are joining Facebook in increasing numbers, meaning that they will soon be the site's second biggest user group, with 3.5 million users aged 55–64 and 2.9 million over-65s.
Sheila, aged 59, says, “I joined to see what my grandchildren are doing, as my daughter posts videos and photos of them. It's a much better way to see what they're doing than waiting for letters and photos in the post. That's how we did it when I was a child, but I think I'm lucky I get to see so much more of their lives than my grandparents did.”
Ironically, Sheila's grandchildren are less likely to use Facebook themselves. Children under 17 are leaving the site – only 2.2 million users are under 17 – but they're not going far from their smartphones. Chloe, aged 15, even sleeps with her phone. “It's my alarm clock so I have to,” she says. “I look at it before I go to sleep and as soon as I wake up.”
Unlike her grandmother's generation, Chloe's age group is spending so much time on their phones at home that they are missing out on spending time with their friends in real life. Sheila, on the other hand, has made contact with old friends from school she hasn't heard from in forty years. “We use Facebook to arrange to meet all over the country,” she says. “It's changed my social life utterly.”
Read the following passage then choose the best answer to each question below.
In 2010, the planetary defense team at NASA had identified and logged 90 per cent of the asteroids near Earth measuring 1km wide. These 'near-Earth objects', or NEOs, are the size of mountains and include anything within 50 million kilometers of Earth's orbit. With an estimated 50 left to log, NASA says none of the 887 it knows about are a significant danger to the planet.
Now NASA is working towards logging some of the smaller asteroids, those measuring 140 meters wide or more. Of the 25,000 estimated asteroids of this size, so far about 8,000 have been logged. Considering that a 19-metre asteroid that exploded above the city of Chelyabinsk in Russia in 2013 injured 1,200 people, these middle-sized asteroids would be a serious danger.
The planetary defense team would still need to work out how to defend the planet against being hit by the truly worrying asteroids – the PHAs. 'Potentially Hazardous Asteroids' are rocks close enough to pass within 7.5 million kilometers of Earth's orbit, none of which are expected to be a threat in the next one hundred years. NASA has created a map of 1,400 PHAs. With technology already available, NASA can track these objects and make predictions about possible impact, at which point two defense solutions could be launched.
The first is DART – the Double Asteroid Redirection Test. Plans are scheduled to test DART on the moon of an asteroid called Didymos. 'Didymoon' is 150 meters wide, orbiting its 800-metre mother, and hopefully the impact of DART will knock it out of its orbit enough for Earth-based telescopes to pick up.
Another suggested defense against a PHA on course to hit Earth is to blow it up using a nuclear weapon. It may sound like a plot from a film, but the Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response (HAMMER) is a genuine NASA proposal. The eight-ton rockets would be fired at an approaching asteroid with the hope of bumping it off course. If the asteroid was too close to Earth for this plan to work, the rockets would carry nuclear bombs to blow it up instead.
Which of the following best serves as the title for the passage?
According to paragraph 1, NEOs ______.
The word "logged" in paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to ______.
The word "those'' in paragraph 2 refers to ______.
It can be inferred from the statement “The planetary defense team would still need to work out how to defend the planet against being hit by the truly worrying asteroids – the PHAs.” that ______.
The word “track” in paragraph 3 is closest in meaning to ______.
As mentioned in the last paragraph, HAMMER is ______.
Which of the following is NOT TRUE according to the passage?