Read the passage carefully and choose the correct answer. 

1. Social anxiety is the single most common psychological problem, according to the 1986 results of the Stanford Shyness Inventory, a survey conducted by Philip G.Zimbardo, professor of social psychology at Stanford University of California. At a party with strangers, for instance, three-quarters of adults have anxiety. “The best estimate is that 40 percent of all Americans suffer from shyness,” says Zimbardo.
2. How can you avoid being nervous when you meet people? Prepare. Preparation for any communicating situation is a must. You’ve been invited to a big dinner party in two weeks. You know that one of the other guests is a politician. Scan the newspapers and magazines; listen to newscasts for topics of conversation in political areas. Then, at the party, pretend you’re an interviewer on talk show. Think of questions to ask that can’t be answered yes or no. “In your opinion, who …” “What do you think of …” Keep the momentum going.
3.Whether you’re delivering a speech, approaching your boss for a raise or an important social occasion, do your homework. The most polished, smoothly delivered, spontaneous-sounding talks are the results of many hours of work. The memorable one-liners and moving phrases that go down in history don’t come from last-minute bursts of inspiration.
4. If you’re making a presentation of any sort, begin preparing as far ahead of time as possible. “Good writing,” says Harvard University historian Richard Marius, “is a kind of wrestling with thought”. Begin the wrestling match early. Two days before your presentation is usually too late to go into the ring and come up with a winning idea.
5. “To communicate,” says New York Times columnist William Samire, “put your thoughts in order, give them a purpose; use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce.”
6. Prepare yourself as well as your material, giving special attention to your voice. A shrill, nasal tone strikes your listener like chalk screeching on a blackboard. By putting energy and resonance into your voice, you will have a positive effect. If your voice is timid or quivers with nervousness, you sense it, the audience hears it, and you see discomfort in their eyes. With energy and enthusiasm in your voice, the listeners say ahhh, tell me more. You read approval.
7. Like your voice, your appearance is a communication tool. For example, if you are animated, you are more likely to see animated listeners. You give the audience the message: I’m glad I’m here; I’m glad you’re here.
8. Your approach can, in fact, be a powerful weapon for deflecting hostility—from an audience, an interviewer, an employer. A benevolent aspect says I understand and conveys good will and positive expectations. It works.
9. However, don’t ever assume that an audience, an interviewer, your boss will be sympathetic. Always be prepared for a grilling. Think beforehand of the ten toughest questions you could get and be ready with your answers. And remember, when you’re asked a hostile question, never show hostility to your questioner. If you do, you lose.
10. While the hostile questioner is talking, prepare your response. Take a positive tack immediately, and make your answers short. The instant the interviewer finishes the question, begin the answer: first point, second point, third point… bingo, your conclusion. It’s like shooting a basket. Keep your eyes on the basket, and bounce, bounce, shoot to your conclusion.
11. The way you listen gives messages about you too. Listen with interest, focusing your eyes on the speaker. If you are sitting next toward the person, angle your body slightly in the chair so that you’re turned toward the person. Animate your face with approval. It says, I’m with you, I’m interested in what you’re saying.
12. Once you’re prepared for a situation, you’re 50 percent of the way toward overcoming nervousness. The other 50 percent is the physical and mental control of nervousness: adjusting your attitude so you have confidence, and control of yourself and your audience.
13. I was in the theater for many years and always went to work with terrible stage fright—until I was in “The King and I”. While waiting offstage one night, I saw Yul Brynner, the show’s star, pushing in a lunging position against a wall. It looked as though he wanted to knock it down. “This helps me control my nervousness,” he explained.
14. I tried it and, sure enough, freed myself from stage fright. Not only that, but pushing the wall seemed to give me a whole new kind of physical energy. Later I discovered that when you push against a wall you contract the muscles that lie just below where your ribs begin to splay. I call this area the “vital triangle”.
15. To understand how these muscles work, try this: Sit in a straight-backed chair and lean slightly forward. Put your palms together in front of you, your elbows pointing out the sides, your fingertips pointing upward, and push so that you feel pressure in the heels of your palms and under your arms.
16. Say ssssssss, like a hiss. As you’re exhaling the s, contract those muscles in the vital triangle as though you were rowing a boat, pulling the oars back and up. The vital triangle should tighten. Relax the muscles at the end of your exhalation, then inhale gently.
17.You can also adjust your attitude to prevent nervousness. What you say to yourself sends a message to your audience. If you tell yourself you’re afraid, that’s the message your listener receives. So select the attitude you want to communicate. Attitude adjusting is your mental suit of armor against nervousness. If you entertain only positive thoughts, you will be giving out these vibes: joy and ease, enthusiasm, sincerity and concern, and authority.
18. You have the power within you to become a forceful, persuasive, confident communicator. With these techniques, you will be able to ask for a raise, make a sale, deal with a family crisis, feel comfortable in social and business situations. Master the simple principles set out here and you will never be nervous again.

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question. 

1. In spite of the difficulties of predicting future trends in world trade, we can specify factors that will be important. Some of these are: population growth; possible scarcity of commodities, the food and energy situation, relations with the Third World (developing nations), pressures to preserve the environment, and international cooperation on political, social, economic, and monetary problems.
2. If population growth continues at its present pace, the future balance between food demand and supply may become dependent on new dietary patterns. Reduced consumption of meat, increased use of new high protein food made from soybeans, and development of ocean resources for food are some alternatives that must be considered.
3. As the population grows, prices of commodities will fluctuate. As countries endeavor to increase yields on existing croplands through intensified use of water, energy, and fertilizers, the cost of commodities will rise.
4. Growth of trade will depend greatly on availability of energy sources. There may still be a trillion barrels of recoverable oil in the Middle East. But the oil crisis of 1974 has led to renewed interest in coal and to a search for alternative sources of energy. Solar, geothermal, and nuclear energy will play a large role in the years to come.
5. Solar energy is available in various forms. Buildings can be heated and cooled by direct use of solar radiation, crops and trees, which are the most efficient converters of sunlight into energy, can be grown for their energy potential, wastes can be burned as fuel, sunlight can be converted into DC (direct current) electricity, electric power can be derived from the sun-warmed surface waters of the ocean (ocean thermal power), lastly, solar radiation can be converted to heat that will drive electric power generators (solar thermal power). Serious problems still remain as to transportation and storage of solar energy.
6. Geothermal energy is the energy contained within the earth. Heat is abundantly available deep in the earth’s core and is constantly being produced. However, this heat is usually located at too deep a level for commercial exploitation. Sometimes heat comes to the surface in the form of lava and geysers. In short, very little is know on the use of geothermal energy, and it has barely been exploited.
7. Nuclear energy is produced in nuclear power plants. At these plants atoms of uranium are split, thus releasing masses of energy. Another source of energy under development is the nuclear fusion of certain atoms of hydrogen. This could eventually replace natural gas as a source of energy.
8. In future trade the key development to watch is the relationship between the industrialized and the developing nations. Third World countries export their mineral deposits and tropical agricultural products, which bring them desired foreign exchange. Tourism has also been greatly responsible for the rapid development of some developing nations. Many Third World nations with high unemployment and low wages have seen an emigration of workers to the developed nations. Western Europe has received millions of such workers from Mediterranean countries.
9. The developing nations profit when these workers bring their savings and their acquired technical skills back home. Many developing nations benefit when Western nations establish manufacturing in their countries to take advantage of cheap labor.
10. As economies mature, economic growth rates tend to level off. The rate of population growth is leveling off today in Western nations. This leveling-off eventually leads to static non-growth markets. A point of saturation sets in—technology and innovation have seemed to achieve the impossible, but then how much further can it go? Herman Kahn, in his book The Next 200 Years, says that a shift in priorities will have to occur for industrialized nations. No longer is the creation of money and jobs essential, it is rather the improvement of the quality of life that must be our concern. Today pollution is of major concern for industrialized nations. Environmentalists are worried about the relationship between industrial objectives and preserving the environment. In developing nations, however, the problem of pollution is ignored for the sake of development.
11. The Western World will eventually move to a period of relatively low economic growth, coupled with a high rate of unemployment. A so-called welfare society will emerge. The unemployed in the new welfare society will be taken care of by the employed through generous contributions to the social welfare system.
12. Political questions remain as to the world’s future. We can only speculate as to whether organized markets such as the Common Market and COMECON could eventually merge. In the present political climate, this would seem impossible, although some cooperation agreements are already in effect. Obviously a merger between the Western and Eastern European markets would greatly enhance world trade.
13. International monetary cooperation will have a significant impact on future trade. If the IMF countries are not able to agree upon a new international monetary order in the years to come, international trade may become too risky for some companies to get involved in . If the IMF is unable to create sufficient international liquidity reserves in the future, there may not be enough liquidity to sustain growth in trade.
14. However, growing international consultation and cooperation in economic, monetary, and political matters will certainly contribute to the flourishing of world trade for years to come.

Read the following passages and choose the correct answer.

(1) Can environmentalists learn to love loggers? The World Bank certainly hopes so. It has just unveiled a new forestry policy that embraces a controversial but promising approach to conserving the rainforest: sustainable harvesting.
(2) After unrelenting criticism from non-governmental groups, the agency adopted a policy a decade ago that sharply curtailed lending for forestry. That pleased some radical greens, who wanted an outright ban on all lending to logging companies. It even suited some senior bank staff just fine, since they were tired of being abused by environmentalists, they were happy to divert money instead into uncontroversial areas such as education. The snag was that deforestation continued in the developing world even faster, some argued, because the agency had walked away from the industry and left it to the real baddies. Even the World Bank’s internal audit department heaped scorn on that approach.
(3) Now, says the bank, it will start lending seriously to forestry again. However, the companies and countries involved must adhere to a code of good behavior: clear-cutting and over-harvesting are out; low-impact logging and“sustainable use”by local people are in. The aim, the bank says, is to improve“the livelihoods of some 500m people living in extreme poverty, who depend on forests, while improving the environmental protection of forests in the developing world. ”
(4) Could a flood of money benefit the world’s rainforests? Optimists think that sustainable harvesting will“crowd out”the unsustainable kind. Maybe. But money alone will not do much, argues Frances Seymour of the World Resources Institute, a think-tank in Washington, D. C. She reckons that lack of clear property rights, murky licensing arrangements and outright corruption-rather than lack of money-are what drives deforestation in many poor countries.
(5) Moreover, seemingly unrelated policies, such as those offering subsidies for agricultural expansion or road-building, can often make even the most virtuous forestry policy irrelevant. If the bank is to do much good for the rainforest, concludes Guillermo Castilleja of the WWW, an activist group, it must be willing to use its influence in national capitals to push countries and companies towards greener policies overall, not just in forestry. The message seems to be getting through. As Ian Johnson, the World Bank’s vice president for the environment, puts it,“what happens outside the forest is at least as important as what happens inside.”

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question. 

     Many Americans harbor a grossly distorted and exaggerated view of most of the risks surrounding food. Fergus Clydesdale, head of the department of food science and nutrition at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, says bluntly that if the dangers from bacterially contaminated chicken were as great as some people believe, “the streets would be littered with people lying here and there.”
     Though the public increasingly demands no-risk food, there is no such thing. Bruce Ames, chairman of the biochemistry department at the University of California, Berkeley, points out that up to 10% of a plant’s weight is made up of natural pesticides. He says, “Since plants do not have jaws or teeth to protect themselves, they employ chemical warfare.” And many naturally produced chemicals, though occurring in tiny amounts, prove in laboratory tests to be strong carcinogens — substance which can cause cancer. Mushrooms might be banned if they were judged by the same standards that apply to food additives. Declares Christina Stark, a nutritionist at Cornell University, “We’ve got far worse natural chemicals in the food supply than anything man-made.”
     Yet the issues are not that simple. While Americans have no reason to be terrified to sit down at the dinner table, they have every reason to demand significant improvements in food and water safety. They unconsciously and unwillingly take in too much of too many dangerous chemicals. If food already contains natural carcinogens, it does not make much sense to add dozens of new man-made ones. Though most people will withstand the small amount of contaminants generally found in food and water, at least a few individuals will probably get cancer one day because of what they eat and drink.
     To make good food and water supplies even better, the Government needs to tighten its regulatory standards, stiffen its inspection program and strengthen its enforcement policies. The food industry should modify some long-accepted practices or turn to less hazardous alternatives. Perhaps most important, consumers will have to do a better job of learning how to handle and cook food properly. The problems that need to be tackled exist all along the food-supply chain, from fields to processing plants to kitchens.

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question. 

     Before going into camp there are many things for the camper to learn if he does not know how, and one of these things is how to make a fire. If one has matches, kindling and wood, there is no trick in making a campfire, but there is a good trick in making a fire where there are no matches and the wood is green or wet.
     Our own Indians get fire by rotating a hard upright stick in a cup-shaped hollow of lighter wood, in which dry charcoal or the shavings of punk were placed. Cotton and any other substances that catch a flame easily would answer as well. This is getting fire by friction.
     Camps are either temporary, that is changed from day to day, or they are permanent and may be visited year after year, or they may be used for a few weeks at a time.
     During the autumn and when the weather is dry and the nights not too cool, the best way to camp is in the open, sleeping on beds of boughs, about a roaring fire, and with one blanket under and another over.
     Small dog tents, like the ones our soldiers carried in the Civil War, are cheap and very convenient. Each man carried a section, and two made a tent, into which two men crawled when it rained, but in dry weather they preferred to sleep in the open, even when it was freezing.
     Shelters of boughs, arranged in an A-framed fashion from a ridge pole make good temporary shelters and are first rate as windbreaks at night.
     A shack built of crossed logs requires some time to build and some skill to make, but it is not beyond the reach of any boy who has seen — and who has not — an old-fashioned log shanty.
     But all boys, even trained foresters, are apt to get lost in strange woods. Every one, however, should know what to do in such a circumstance. As a rule the denser growth of moss on trees is on the north side. This knowledge may help find the direction, but it is better to carry a small pocket compass.
     When the sky is clear, the sun and the stars help to guide the course, and if they are followed one is saved from traveling in a circle, as the lost are pretty sure to do in a dense forest.
     If twigs are broken from bushes they will serve to show the course to those out searching. A good plan is to follow down the course of a stream, which always flows into a larger body of water and will lead to some abode. If a hill is accessible, the lay of the land may be had from its summit.
     In any event, should you be lost, do not get rattled. You will be missed in camp and a search will be made by your friends.

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question. 

     Whether you’re delivering a speech, approaching your boss for a raise or addressing audience on an important social occasion, do your homework. The most polished, smoothly delivered, spontaneous-sounding talks are the result of many hours of work. The memorable one-liners and moving phrases that go down in history don’t come from last minute burst of inspiration.
     If you’re making a presentation of any sort, begin preparing as far ahead of time as possible. “Good writing,” says Harvard University historian Richard Marius, “is a kind of wrestling with thought.” Begin the wrestling match early. Two days before your presentation is usually too late to go into the ring and come up with a winning idea.
     Prepare yourself as well as your material, giving special attention to your voice. A shrill, nasal tone strikes your listener like chalk screeching on a blackboard. By putting energy and resonance into your voice, you will have a positive effect. If your voice is timid or quivers with nervousness, you sense it, the audience hears it, and you see discomfort in their eyes. With energy and enthusiasm in your voice, the listeners say ahhh, tell me more. You read approval.
     Like your voice, your appearance is a communication tool. For example, if you are animated, you are most likely to see animated listeners. You give the audience the message: I’m glad I’m here; I’m glad you’re here.
     However, don’t ever assume that an audience, an interviewer, your boss will be sympathetic. Always be prepared for a grilling. Think beforehand of the ten toughest questions you could get and be ready with your answers. And remember, when you’re asked a hostile question, never show hostility to your questioner. If you do, you lose.
     While the hostile questioner is talking, prepare your response. Take a positive tack immediately, and make your answer short. The instant the interviewer finishes the question, begin the answer: first point, second point, third point...bingo, your conclusion.
     The way you listen gives messages about you too. Listen with interest, focusing your eyes on the speaker. If he or she is sitting next to you, angle your body slightly in the chair so that you’re turned toward the person. Animate your face with approval. It says, I’m with you, I’m interested in what you’re saying.
     Once you’re prepared for a situation, you’re 50 per cent of the way toward overcoming nervousness. The other 50 per cent is the physical and mental control of nervousness: adjusting your attitude so you have confidence, and control of yourself and your audience.

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question. 

     Imagine a world in which there was suddenly no emotion — a world in which human beings could feel no love or happiness, no terror or hate. Try to imagine the consequences of such a transformation.
     People might not be able to stay alive: knowing neither joy nor pleasure, anxiety nor fear, they would be as likely to repeat acts that hurt them as acts that were beneficial. They could not learn: they could not benefit from experience because this emotionless world would lack rewards and punishments. Society would soon disappear: people would be as likely to harm one another as to provide help and support. Human relationships would not exist: in a world without friends or enemies, there co uld be no marriage, affection among companions, or bonds among members of groups. Society’s economic underpinnings would be destroyed: since earning $10 million would be no more pleasant than earning $ 10, there would be no incentive to work. In fact, there would be no incentives of any kind. For as we will see, incentives imply a capacity to enjoy them.
     In such a world, the chances that the human species would survive are next to zero, because emotions are the basic instrument of our survival and adaptation. Emotions structure the world for us in important ways.
     As individuals, we categorize objects on the basis of our emotions. True we consider the length, shape, size, or texture, but an object’s physical aspects are less important than what it has done or can do to us — hurt us, surprise us, anger us or make us joyful. We also use categorizations colored by emotions in our families, communities, and overall society.
     Out of our emotional experiences with objects and events comes a social feeling of agreement that certain things and actions are “good” and others are “bad”, and we apply these categories to every aspect of our social life — from what foods we eat and what clothes we wear to how we keep promises and which people our group will accept.
     In fact, society exploits our emotional reactions and attitudes, such as loyalty, morality, pride, shame, guilt, fear and greed, in order to maintain itself. It gives high rewards to individuals who perform important tasks such as surgery, makes heroes out of individuals for unusual or dangerous achievements such as flying fighter planes in a war, and uses the legal penal system to make people afraid to engage in anti-social acts.

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question. 

     The estimates of the numbers of home-schooled children vary widely. The U.S. Department of Education estimates there are 250, 000 to 350, 000 home-schooled children in the country. Home-school advocates put the number much higher – at about a million.
     Many public school advocates take a harsh attitude toward home schoolers, perceiving their actions as the ultimate slap in the face for public education and a damaging move for the children. Home schoolers harbor few kind words for public schools, charging shortcomings that range from lack of religious perspective in the curriculum to a herdlike approach to teaching children.
     Yet, as public school officials realize they stand little to gain by remaining hostile to the home-school population, and as home schoolers realize they can reap benefits from public schools, these hard lines seem to be softening a bit. Public schoolers have moved closer to tolerance and, in some cases, even cooperation.
     Says John Marshall, an education official, “We are becoming relatively tolerant of home schoolers.” The idea is, “Let’s give the kids access to public school so they’ll see it’s not as terrible as they’ve been told, and they’ll want to come back.”
     Perhaps, but don’t count on it, say home-school advocates. Home schoolers, oppose the system because they have strong convictions that their approach to education — whether fueled by religious enthusiasm or the individual child’s interests and natural pace — is best.
     “The bulk of home schoolers just want to be left alone,” says Enge Cannon, associate director of the National Center For Home Education. She says home schoolers choose that path for a variety of reasons, but religion plays a role 85 percent of the time.
     Professor Van Galen breaks home schoolers into two groups. Some home schoolers want their children to learn not only traditional subject matter but also “strict religious doctrine and a conservative political and social perspective. Not incidentally, they also want their children to learn — both intellectually and emotionally — that the family is the most important institution in society.”
     Other home schoolers contend “not so much that the schools teach heresy, but that schools teach whatever they teach inappropriately”. Van Galen writes, “These parents are highly independent and strive to ‘take responsibility’ for their own lives within a society that they define as bureaucratic and inefficient.”

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question. 

     On the New York Mercantile Exchange, oil prices broke the record of $76.70 a barrel set just Thursday. The new price of oil for delivery in August shot to $77.95 before finishing the day at $77.03.
     While $80-a-barrel oil seemed like a skeptic’s worst-case outlook a few months ago, oil traders are increasingly saying that it is now just a matter of time before prices cross that threshold. Oil futures contracts for delivery beyond this summer passed $80 a barrel for the first time on Thursday.
     “The feeling is that we’re in a fairly bullish market right now,” said Antoine Halff, head of research at Fimat. “Gasoline demand over the last few weeks has been very robust. Perhaps the bigger issue on top of that is geopolitics. And clearly the market is very jittery about what’s going on in Israel.” Oil markets are typically sensitive to any political instability in the Middle East. Recently, they have been unsettled by Israeli military incursions into Gaza and then, this week, Lebanon. So, a market already worried about the potential for conflict with Iran and North Korea over their nuclear programs is growing even more anxious. William Rhodes, chief investment strategist at Rhodes Analytics, said, “People are scared, that’s the bottom line.”
     The Commerce Department said that retail sales fell by 0.1 percent in June, seasonally adjusted, the first drop since February. A University of Michigan survey that showed falling consumer confidence was one of the reasons.
     How resilient consumer spending proves to be is something that will continue to factor heavily into stock performance. Most economists believe that consumers will curb their spending somewhat as the year goes on, and economic growth is expected to slow. But there is disagreement over how much spending will slow.
     “The persistence of high gasoline prices, coupled with lower equity prices and lower consumer sentiment, will restrain the growth of real consumer spending in the second half of 2006,” Brian Bethune, an analyst with Global Insight, wrote yesterday in a report about the retail sales numbers. But many analysts noted that the month’s decline in retail sales was exaggerated by poor car sales, and said that consumers were likely to keep shopping for other goods.
     Even though the market swooned this week, analysts said that there were no signs yet that the drop was part of a larger unraveling of the economy. 

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question. 

     Farmers in the Midwest put in some of the longest workdays of any profession in the United States. In addition to caring for their crops and livestock, they have to keep up with new farming techniques, such as those for combining soil erosion and increasing livestock production. It is essential that farmers adopt these advances in technology if they want to continue to meet the growing demand of a hungry world.
     Agriculture is the number one industry in the United States and agricultural products are the country’s leading export. American farmers manage to feed not only the total population of the United States, but also millions of other people throughout the rest of the world. Corn and soybean exports alone account for approximately 75% of the amount sold in world market.
     This productivity, however, has its price. Intensive cultivation exposes the earth to the damaging forces of nature. Every year wind and water remove tons of rich soil from the nation’s croplands, with the result that soil erosion has become a national problem concerning everyone from the farmer to the consumer.
     Each field is covered by a limited amount of topsoil, the upper layer of earth which is the richest in the nutrient and minerals necessary for growing crops. Ever since the first farmers arrived in the Midwest almost 200 years ago, cultivation and, consequently, erosion have been depleting the supply of topsoil. In the 1830s, nearly two feet of rich, black topsoil covered the Midwest. Today the average depth is only eight inches, and every decade another inch is blown or washed away. This erosion is steadily decreasing the productivity of valuable cropland. A United States Agricultural Department survey states that if erosion continues at its present rate, corn and soybean yields in the Midwest may drop as much as 30% over the next 50 years.
     So far, farmers have been able to compensate for the loss of fertile topsoil by applying more chemical fertilizers to their fields; however, while this practice has increased crop yields, it has been devastating for ecology. Agriculture has become one of the biggest polluters on the nation’s precious water supply. Rivers, lakes, and underground reserves of water are being filled in and poisoned by soil and chemicals carried by the drainage from eroding fields. Furthermore, fertilizers only replenish the soil; they do not prevent its loss.
     Clearly something else has to be done in order to avoid an eventual ecological disaster. Conservationists insist that the solution to this problem lies in new and better farming techniques. Concerned farmers are building terraces on hilly fields, rotating their crops, and using new plowing methods to cut soil loss significantly. Substantial progress has been made, but soil erosion is far from being under control. 

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question.

     A college education can be very costly in the United States, especially at a private school. Rising costs have led more and more families to borrow money to help pay for college.
There are different federal loans and private loans for students and parents. Interest rates on some of these loans will go up on July 1st. As borrowing has increased, there are growing concerns that many students graduate with too much debt. In 1993, less than one-half of graduates from four-year colleges had student loans. Now two-thirds of them do. Their average loan debt when they graduate is nineteen thousand dollars. At public universities, the average is seventeen thousand dollars.
     The Project on Student Debt is an action group that collects these numbers from reports. It notes that averages do not present the full picture. For example, in 2004, one-fourth of students with loans graduated more than twenty-five thousand dollars in debt. And that did not include borrowing by their parents. The Project on Student Debt says parents as well as students are borrowing more to pay for college. Students can expect to take about ten years to pay back their loans. Repayment does not begin until after they are out of school.
     Higher borrowing limits have also helped push up student debts. Students from all economic levels are borrowing more. Corrected for inflation, student loans have increased around sixty percent in ten years.
     Researchers say one effect is that the higher the debts, the more likely graduates are to look only for high paying jobs. That means there is less chance they will take jobs in areas like teaching or other public service. A study done in 2002 for a major student lender found that debts can also affect lives in other ways. Some students paying back their college loans said they delayed buying their first house. Some delayed marriage or having children.
     In May, groups representing students, parents and college officials asked the government to change some of its loan repayment rules. The requested changes would recognize graduates who have difficulty repaying their loans because they do not earn very much. They would be able to pay less fight after they graduate, then pay more as their earnings increase. 

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question. 

     About 60 million Americans regularly suffer from insomnia, either because they are taking medication, or experiencing pain, or not eating right. Or — according to Russell Rosenberg, who directs the Sleep Medicine Institute in Atlanta, Georgia — simply because they are living in the modern world.
     “It’s a 24/7 society now. That is, you have Internet 24 [hours], 7 [days a week], television, radio. Everything can keep you distracted from the time you need to sleep. Plus, people are working harder, working more jobs, trying to squeeze in more family-time, more leisure-time and so forth, and so there’s only so much time to do all the things we want to do in one particular day.”
     According to an annual poll conducted by the National Sleep Foundation, in 2005, 75 percent of Americans experienced sleeping problems ranging from minor and transient to severe and chronic. That is up from 62 percent in 1999, when the NSF first conducted its poll.
     The number of Americans turning to prescription sleep aids for help has gone up even more dramatically: nearly 60 percent over the past five years. American pharmacists filled about 42 million sleeping pill prescriptions last year, and most of them were for either Ambien or Lunesta, two recent additions to the sleep aid market.
     These drugs are not believed to be habit-forming, and they don’t seem to have the same liver-damaging side-effects that earlier sleep aids had. At the same time, there is some evidence that these new sleeping pills may not be completely harmless.
     Sleep experts also recommend their patients with what is known as “cognitive behavioral therapy,” or CBT. It is a form of psychotherapy that tries to change the way a patient thinks, feels, and acts about sleep.
     It doesn’t yield immediate results, though, and in many parts of the country, it is unavailable. There are only about 200 clinicians worldwide who have extensive CBT training in the area of sleep. That is part of the reason prescription drugs have become so popular.
     But the biggest reason, says Gregg Jacobs, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, is marketing. “You’ll see their ads every night on television now. They’re the most frequent drug ads on TV. As a result, people around the United States — and soon around the world — are being given the message that you can take a sleeping pill, and it will cure your insomnia. And when people hear that, they rush out to buy this pill.”

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question. 

     Soccer might be the most popular sport in the world, but for decades, Americans have managed to resist its charm. Their attention has been focused, of course, on the big three American sports: baseball, football and basketball. And while soccer is rapidly gaining popularity among younger Americans, the older generation remains detached from the game, even when the rest of the world is glued to TV screens watching the 2006 World Cup matches.
     It’s not as though soccer is a stranger to American shores. The U.S. national soccer team played in the first World Cup in 1930. But from the start, the game had an image for many Americans as an immigrant sport. Still soccer began to attract more attention in the United States after the 1974 World Cup.
     The following year, the country got its first professional soccer teams, with the launch of the North American Soccer League. The New York Cosmos became the league’s flagship franchise when it acquired a stellar roster of players from 16 different countries, including the Brazilian soccer legend Pele, the high-scoring Italian great Georgio Chinagalia, and German superstar Franz Beckenbauer. By 1977, attendance at American soccer games had grown to a record 62,000.
     Peppe Pinton, a veteran soccer player and the executive director of the Cosmos soccer camps, likes to recall those golden days when American fans packed the stadiums to watch some of the world’s best soccer players — most of them playing on the same team. “Americans are used to watch winners,” Pinton says. “Americans are used to watch superstars, great players in all sports, and they are not settling for inferiority. The Cosmos team was not successful in the early years, but it was successful when those players came here.”
     People lined up to get into the stadium like they would line up to get into a popular restaurant, Pinton says. “People attracted people. And the Cosmos made this happen all over the U.S.,” he says. “It drew record crowds in Seattle, in Miami, in Tampa, Boston, in Chicago and then they went all over the world. They went even into China when nobody was reaching China those years.”
     But for 40 years, the U.S. was unable to qualify for World Cup games because most of the players on its soccer teams were not American citizens. Finally, in 1990, with enough home-grown or naturalized players on its rosters, the U.S. was able to field a World Cup team.

Directions: Write a brief answer (one to three complete sentences) to each of the questions. Pay attention to the words, grammar and sentence structure in your answers.

1. In spite of the difficulties of predicting future trends in world trade, we can specify factors that will be important. Some of these are: population growth; possible scarcity of commodities, the food and energy situation, relations with the Third World (developing nations), pressures to preserve the environment, and international cooperation on political, social, economic, and monetary problems.
2. If population growth continues at its present pace, the future balance between food demand and supply may become dependent on new dietary patterns. Reduced consumption of meat, increased use of new high protein food made from soybeans, and development of ocean resources for food are some alternatives that must be considered.
3. As the population grows, prices of commodities will fluctuate. As countries endeavor to increase yields on existing croplands through intensified use of water, energy, and fertilizers, the cost of commodities will rise.
4. Growth of trade will depend greatly on availability of energy sources. There may still be a trillion barrels of recoverable oil in the Middle East. But the oil crisis of 1974 has led to renewed interest in coal and to a search for alternative sources of energy. Solar, geothermal, and nuclear energy will play a large role in the years to come.
5. Solar energy is available in various forms. Buildings can be heated and cooled by direct use of solar radiation, crops and trees, which are the most efficient converters of sunlight into energy, can be grown for their energy potential, wastes can be burned as fuel, sunlight can be converted into DC (direct current) electricity, electric power can be derived from the sun-warmed surface waters of the ocean (ocean thermal power), lastly, solar radiation can be converted to heat that will drive electric power generators (solar thermal power). Serious problems still remain as to transportation and storage of solar energy.
6. Geothermal energy is the energy contained within the earth. Heat is abundantly available deep in the earth’s core and is constantly being produced. However, this heat is usually located at too deep a level for commercial exploitation. Sometimes heat comes to the surface in the form of lava and geysers. In short, very little is know on the use of geothermal energy, and it has barely been exploited.
7. Nuclear energy is produced in nuclear power plants. At these plants atoms of uranium are split, thus releasing masses of energy. Another source of energy under development is the nuclear fusion of certain atoms of hydrogen. This could eventually replace natural gas as a source of energy.
8. In future trade the key development to watch is the relationship between the industrialized and the developing nations. Third World countries export their mineral deposits and tropical agricultural products, which bring them desired foreign exchange. Tourism has also been greatly responsible for the rapid development of some developing nations. Many Third World nations with high unemployment and low wages have seen an emigration of workers to the developed nations. Western Europe has received millions of such workers from Mediterranean countries.
9. The developing nations profit when these workers bring their savings and their acquired technical skills back home. Many developing nations benefit when Western nations establish manufacturing in their countries to take advantage of cheap labor.
10. As economies mature, economic growth rates tend to level off. The rate of population growth is leveling off today in Western nations. This leveling-off eventually leads to static non-growth markets. A point of saturation sets in—technology and innovation have seemed to achieve the impossible, but then how much further can it go? Herman Kahn, in his book The Next 200 Years, says that a shift in priorities will have to occur for industrialized nations. No longer is the creation of money and jobs essential, it is rather the improvement of the quality of life that must be our concern. Today pollution is of major concern for industrialized nations. Environmentalists are worried about the relationship between industrial objectives and preserving the environment. In developing nations, however, the problem of pollution is ignored for the sake of development.
11. The Western World will eventually move to a period of relatively low economic growth, coupled with a high rate of unemployment. A so-called welfare society will emerge. The unemployed in the new welfare society will be taken care of by the employed through generous contributions to the social welfare system.
12. Political questions remain as to the world’s future. We can only speculate as to whether organized markets such as the Common Market and COMECON could eventually merge. In the present political climate, this would seem impossible, although some cooperation agreements are already in effect. Obviously a merger between the Western and Eastern European markets would greatly enhance world trade.
13. International monetary cooperation will have a significant impact on future trade. If the IMF countries are not able to agree upon a new international monetary order in the years to come, international trade may become too risky for some companies to get involved in . If the IMF is unable to create sufficient international liquidity reserves in the future, there may not be enough liquidity to sustain growth in trade.
14. However, growing international consultation and cooperation in economic, monetary, and political matters will certainly contribute to the flourishing of world trade for years to come.

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question.

     Two decades ago, the channels that separate the Adriatic Islands were brimming with giant blue-fin tuna, a species so plentiful that tourists used to climb ladders by the sea to watch the schools swim by.
     Today, these majestic predators are rarely, if ever, caught. The catches have dropped by 80 percent over the past few years, even for high-tech trawlers that now comb remote corners of the sea in search of the hard-to-find fish.
     “This is past the alarm stage,” said Simon Cripps, director of the global marine program at the World Wildlife Fund. “We are seeing a complete collapse of the tuna population. It could disappear and never come back.” The group is urging the European Union to impose an immediate fishing moratorium until the international body that regulates tuna catches meets in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in November.
     Many edible fish stocks in the Mediterranean and its extension, the Adriatic, have sharply declined in the past decade because of pollution and intensive fishing, including crayfish and John Dory, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. In Croatia, much of the fish eaten at seaside resorts is imported from as far away as the United States.
     But it is the blue-fin tuna that is in crisis, thanks to a new and lucrative European network of fishing and fish farming companies that provide the prized fish to sushi and sashimi markets in Japan. With tuna prices going as high as $15 a pound in Tokyo, European trawlers fish for tuna aggressively and illegally, far exceeding international quotas meant to protect the species, scientists said. Compounding the problem is the recent development of tuna fattening farms in Croatia, Spain, Turkey and other Mediterranean countries.
     Now, even small juvenile tuna, captured in the few corners of the Mediterranean where the species still breeds or even from the Atlantic, can be brought to the vast underwater cages that line the Croatian coast, where they are fed for months or years until they are ready for market. And so, though few tuna are in Croatia’s seas and none are in its restaurants, tuna is one of this country’s most lucrative food exports. One hundred percent of Croatia’s tuna is farm-fattened, ending up as toro—precious, fatty raw tuna. 

Reading Comprehension: In the passage, there are five questions with four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the best answer and then blacken the corresponding letter on your Answer Sheet.

Reading Comprehension:

In the passage, there are five questions with four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the best answer and then blacken the corresponding letter on your Answer Sheet.

Reading Comprehension:

In the passage, there are five questions with four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the best answer and then blacken the corresponding letter on your Answer Sheet.

Reading Comprehension
Directions: Read the following passage. Choose the best answer from the four choices marked A, B, C and D for each question.

     Those who had the pleasure of watching Benny Goodman at work saw a rather ordinary-looking man in rimless glasses and a conservative business suit; but they also saw a human being who could play the clarinet on stage like no one before or since. This made Benny Goodman a unique individual.
     Other Americans who have stood out from the flock include Joe DiMaggio, Clarence Darrow, and Jonas Salk. They, like Benny Goodman, were recognized and honored for no other reason than excellence.
     It is doing something better than other people that makes us unique. Yet a surprising number of people still see individuality as a surface thing. They wear garish clothes, dye their hair strange colors and decorate their skin with tattoos to make some kind of social statement. But an ordinary guy who has dyed his hair purple or orange is nothing more than the same person with a funny-looking head.
     The whole purpose of individuality is excellence. The people who comprehend the simple principle of being unique through performance make our entire political-economic system work. Those who invent, who know more about a subject than other people do, and who take something that doesn’t work and make it work - these people are the very soul of progress.
     Fortunately, enough Americans have been inspired to do something with their uniqueness that we have developed in less than three centuries from a frontier outpost onto not only the stronghold of freedom but a country strong enough to protect that freedom. These people prized the notions of individuality and excellence about all things and thus kept the great machine functioning. The ones with the purple hair and the shining jewelry are just along for the ride, trying to be “different” and not knowing how to go about it.
     The student who earns A’s on his report card has grasped the idea and has found the real meaning of individuality. So has the youngster who has designed his own spaceship, who gives piano recitals, who paints pictures of the world around him, or who can name all the states and their capitals.
     Benny Goodman understood it too. This is why he was at his best, blowing his clarinet, in a blue suit and black shoes.

Reading Comprehension: In the passage, there are five questions with four choices marked A, B, C and D. Choose the best answer and then blacken the corresponding letter on your Answer Sheet.