Choose the word which has the underlined part pronounced differently from the others.
salmon
halve
calve
dilemma
Choose the word which has the underlined part pronounced differently from the others.
pour
flour
scour
sour
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.
Donald Trump's pledge to rip up existing trade deals with Mexico would _____ substantial damage on the US economy and kill the region's competitiveness on the world stage, according to the Mexican economist who led the country's trade talks with the US.
Discontent among the ship's crew finally led to the _____.
Obama expressed regret as a U.S drone strike has _____ killed innocent hostages.
Read the text and choose the best answer to fill in the blanks.
If you're an environmentalist, plastic is a word you tend to say with a sneer or a snarl. It has become a symbol of our wasteful, throw-away society. But there seems little it is here to stay, and the truth is, of course, that plastic has brought enormous , even environmental evil - it's the way society chooses to uses and abuse them.
Almost all the 50 or so different kinds of modern plastic are made from oil, gas, or coal-non-renewable natural . We well over three million tonnes of the stuff in Britain each year and, sooner or later, most of it is thrown away. A high of our annual consumption is in the of packaging, and this about seven percent by weight of our domestic . Almost all of it could be recycled, but very little of it is, though the plastic recycling is growing fast.
The plastics themselves are extremely energy-rich they have a higher caloric value than coal and one method of "recovery" strongly favored by the plastic manufacturers is the of waste plastic into fuel.
Fill each of the following blanks with ONE suitable word.
IS HONEST THE BEST POLICY?
Radical honesty therapy as it is known in the US, is the latest thing to be held up as the key to happiness and success. It involves telling the truth all the time, no exceptions for hurt feelings. But this is not as easy as it may . Altruistic lies, rather than the conniving, self-aggrandizing variety are an essential of polite society.
We all lie mad. It wears us out. It is the major source of all human stress, says Brad Blanton, psychotherapist and founder of the Centre for Radical Honesty. He has become a name in the US, where he spreads his message via day-time television talk shows. He certainly has his work out for him. In a recent survey of Americans, 93 percent admitted to lying regularly, and habitually in the workplace. Dr. Blanton is typically blunt about the consequences of being deceitful. 'Lying people,' he says.
Dr. Blanton is adamant that minor inconveniences are at all compared with the huge benefits of truth-telling. 'Telling the truth, especially after hiding it for a long time, takes guts. It isn't easy. But it is better than the . 'This, he believes, is the stress of living in the prison of the mind,' which results in depression and ill health. 'Your body stays tied up in and is susceptible to illness," he says. 'Allergies, high blood pressure, and insomnia are all made worse by lying. Good relationship skills, parenting skills, and management skills are also dependent on telling the truth.
Read the following passage then choose the best answer to each question below.
Blogging: Confessing to the world
Some time ago, a website highlighted the risks of public check-ins - online announcements of your where-abouts. The site's point was blunt you may think you are just telling the world, 'Hey I'm at this place' - but you are also advertising your out-and-about-ness to all kinds of people everywhere - not all of them people you might like to bump into. This appeared to confirm the growing awareness that there might be a downside to all the frantic sharing the web has enabled. The vast new opportunities to publish any and every aspect of our lives to a potentially global audience hold out all sorts of tantalising possibilities: Wealth! Fame! So we plunge into the maelstrom of the internet, tossing confessions, personal photos and stories into the digital vortex. Too late we realise that the water is crowded and treacherous - and we are lost.
Depressing? Perhaps, but don't give up. This future has a map, drawn for us years ago by a reckless group of online pioneers. In the early days of the web, they sailed these waters and located all the treacherous shoals. They got fired from their jobs, found and lost friends and navigated celebrity's temptations and perils - all long before the invention of social networking. These pioneers, the first wave of what we now call bloggers, have already been where the rest of us seem to be going. Before their tales scroll off our collective screen, it's worth spending a little time with them. After all, those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repost it.
In January 1994, Justin Hall, a 19-year-old student, began posting to the 'WWW', as it was then known, something inhabited mostly by grad students, scientists and a handful of precocious teens like him. The web had been invented at CERN, the international physics lab in Switzerland, no researchers could more easily share their work. Hall saw something else: an opportunity to share his life. Link by link, he built a hypertext edifice of autobiography, a dense thicket of verbal self-exposure leavened with photos and art. In January 1996, on a dare, he began posting a daily blog, and readers flocked to the spectacle of a reckless young man pushing the boundaries of this new medium in every direction at once.
Hall's ethos was absolute: cross his path and you could appear on his site; no topic was taboo. Certainly, this was the work of an exhibitionist, but there was also a rigour and beauty to his project that only a snob would refuse to call art. One day though, visitors to Hall's site discovered his home page gone, replaced with a single anguished video titled Dark Night. His story tumbled out; he'd fallen spectacularly in love, but when he gaited writing about it on his site he was told 'either the blog goes, or I do'. He'd published his life on the internet and, Hall protested, 'it makes people not trust me'. The blog went, but the dilemma persists. Sharing online is great. But if you expect your song of yourself to 'make people want to be with you', you'll be disappointed.
In 2002, Heather Armstrong, a young web worker in Los Angeles, had a blog called Douce. Occasionally, she wrote about her job at a software company. One day an anonymous colleague sent the address of Armstrong's blog to every vice president at her company - including some whom she'd mocked - and that was the end of her job. Those who study the peculiar social patterns of the networked world have a term to describe what was at work here. They call it the 'online distribution effect': that feeling so many of as have that we can get away with saying things online that we'd never dream of saying in person. But our digital lives are interwoven with our real lives. When we pretend otherwise, we risk making terrible, life-changing mistakes.
Armstrong's saga had a happy ending. Though she was upset by the experience and stopped blogging for several months afterwards, she ended up getting married and restarting her blog with a focus on her new family. Today she is a star in the burgeoning ranks of 'mommy bloggers' and her writing supports her house hold. Once a poster child for the wages of web indiscretion, she has become a virtuoso of managed self-revelation. What Armstrong has figured out is something we would all do well to remember: the web may allow us to say anything, but that doesn't mean we should.
Why does the writer describe a website about public check-ins in the first paragraph?
What is the writer's attitude to the online pioneers mentioned in the second paragraph?
What does the writer suggest about Justin Hall in the third paragraph?
What point is exemplified by the references to Hall's project in the fourth paragraph?
What does the account of Armstrong's later career suggest about blogging?
In this article, the writer's aim is to _____.
Read the following passage and choose which of the headings from A - L match the blanks. There are two extra headings, which do not match any of the paragraphs.
A. The problems with the Julian calendar
B. The calendar in Eastern fun
C. Early adoption of the Gregorian calendar
D. The problems with the early Roman calendar
E. Why some countries were late to change their calendars
F. Priests and the calendar
G. How the Julian calendar works
H. The problem with the solar year
I. Current rules for leap years
K. The development of the Gregorian calendar
L. The length of a year
Calendars Through the Years
1.
How many days are there in a year? You might say 365, with an extra 'leap day' added to the end of February every four years. This averages out to a quarter of a day every year, so that every year is 365.25 days. This is because the actual length of a solar year - that is, the time it takes for the Earth to complete a full rotation of the Sun - is a little bit more than 365 days. Throughout history, most calendars have tried to match their year to the length of a solar year, with varying degrees of accuracy.
2.
The calendar used in much of the world today is based on the one used by the Romans. Because Romans thought that even numbers were unlucky, the earliest Roman calendar had months of 29 or 31 days, with 28 days in February. Since the year had 355 days, they would add a leap month of 27 days between February and March every 3 to 5 years, as determined by priests called pontifices. As a result, the average year was anywhere from 360 to 364 days, so it is no surprise that the calendar very quickly deviated from the solar year.
3.
Julius Caesar decided that the calendar should be based on the solar year, following a special year of 445 days in 46 BC that readjusted the months to their proper seasons. From 45 BC onwards, the months were given the current lengths of 30 or 31 days, retaining 28 for February but adding the 29th February every four years to account for the accumulated extra quarter days. The names of the months used by the Romans remain in English today, either with a slight adjustment to spelling (e.g., they called it Aprilis, we call it April) or in the exact same form (e.g., they also called September, October, November and December by those very names).
4.
The calendar used from 45 BC onwards - known as the Julian calendar, after the man who imposed it on the world - is far more accurate than any earlier calendar. Even so, the Julian calendar deviates from the solar year by 1 day every 128 years. This is because the exact length of the solar year is actually 365.2422 days, or about 11 minutes shorter than the 365.25 days calculated by the Romans.
5.
By the 16th century AD, the discrepancy between the solar year and the Julian calendar was notable enough that something had to be done. It took several decades of consultation among mathematicians and astronomers until it was finally decided to end the Julian calendar and move to a new system of calculating leap years. Pope Gregory XIII decreed that the Julian calendar would end on Thursday 4th October 1582 and that the following day would be Friday 15th October. This would remove the 10 days that had been added in error by the Julian system for leap years, and readjust the calendar to the seasons in the solar year.
6.
The Gregorian calendar was put into use immediately in Italy, Portugal, Spain, Poland and most of France, and in Austria, Hungary and much of Germany in the next few years. However, the new calendar was not implemented by the United Kingdom and its overseas territories, such as the colonies that are known today as Canada and the United States, until 1752. By then, the adjustment required was 11 days, so the Parliament decided that the British would go to bed at the end of the day on 2nd September 1752 and wake up the next morning on 14th September. Sweden followed the British in moving to the Gregorian calendar the next year.
7.
An even longer adjustment was required when the Gregorian calendar was adopted by Japan in 1872, and in the early 20th century by China, Bulgaria, Estonia, Russia, Greece and Turkey. Many of these countries that were among the last to adopt the Gregorian calendar for civic purposes used the Byzantine calendar, a variant of the Julian calendar, prior to the change. Many people in these same nations continue to use the Eastern Orthodox calendar (also based on the Julian calendar) for religious feasts and festivals. Similarly, in China and Japan, a traditional calendar is still used to select dates for weddings, funerals and new ventures. These last two countries did not exactly delay the move to the Gregorian calendar; rather, they started using it once it became beneficial, due to the more extensive connections with other countries on that calendar.
8.
As we can see from this brief history of calendars, one of the key challenges in making any calendar is the decision about how to account for the variations between the calendar year and the solar year, since the latter includes a fraction of a day. The Gregorian calendar improved considerably on the Julian calendar, limiting the discrepancy to one day every 3,336 years. While it is commonly believed that every fourth year is a leap year, the actual rule imposed in 1582 is slightly more complicated: we add a day to February in years that are divisible by 4, but not in years divisible by 100 unless they can be divided by 400. Thus, 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not leap years, but 1600 and 2000 were. This adjustment means that the average calendar year is only 26 seconds longer than a solar year, so it won't be an issue again until the year 4918.
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
Finally, the new prime minister has been appointed. (LAST)
=> The ..........
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
It doesn't make any difference if they paint the board white or yellow. (MATTER)
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
Our representatives have been criticizing the new concept. (CRITICAL)
=> ..........
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
Jerry had terrible problems with solving the riddle. (HARDLY)
=> ..........
Complete the second sentence using the word given so that it has the same meaning to the first.
George won't lend his tape recorder to you if you don't promise to bring it back by Saturday. (GIVE)
=> Unless ...........
Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.
After I had introduced my guests to each other, I made a long speech on the current changes in the computer technologies.
=> Having ..........
Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.
I'm sure it wasn't Mrs. Elton you saw because she's in Bristol.
=> It can't .....
Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.
It's a pity that you wrote that letter.
=> I .....
Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.
Success in the academic field depends on your ability to amass qualifications.
=> The ............
Complete the second sentence so that it has the same meaning to the first.
The president's bodyguards stood behind him watching.
=> Watchfully .....