Grammar and Vocabulary Practice Test
Grammar and Vocabulary Practice Test
V. READING COMPREHENSION: Read the text and choose the best answer A, B, C
or D. (10 pts)
It's often said that we learn things at the wrong time. University students frequently
do the minimum of work because they're crazy about a good social life instead. Children
often scream before their piano practice because it's so boring. They have to be given gold
stars and medals to be persuaded to swim, or have to be bribed to take exams. But the story is
different when you're older.
Over the years, I've done my share of adult learning. At 30, I went to a college and did
courses in History and English. It was an amazing experience. For starters, I was paying, so
there was no reason to be late - I was the one frowning and drumming my fingers if the tutor
was late, not the other way round. Indeed, if I could persuade him to linger for an extra five
minutes, it was a bonus, not a nuisance. I wasn't frightened to ask questions, and homework was
a pleasure not a pain. When I passed an exam, I had passed it for me and me alone, not for my
parents or my teachers. The satisfaction I got was entirely personal.
Some people fear going back to school because they worry that their brains have got
rusty. But the joy is that, although some parts have rusted up, your brain has learnt all kinds
of other things since you were young. It has learnt to think independently and flexibly and is
much better at relating one thing to another. What you lose in the rust department, you gain in
the maturity department.
In some ways, age is a positive plus. For instance, when you're older, you get less
frustrated. Experience has told you that, if you're calm and simply do something carefully
again and again, eventually you'll get the hang of it. The confidence you have in other areas -
from being able to drive a car, perhaps - means that if you can't, say, build a chair instantly, you
don't, like a child, want to destroy your first pathetic attempts. Maturity tells you that you will,
with application, eventually get there.
I hated piano lessons at school, but I was good at music. And coming back to it, with a
teacher who could explain why certain exercises were useful and with musical concepts that, at
the age of ten, I could never grasp, was magical. Initially, I did feel a bit strange, thumping out
a piece that I'd played for my school exams, with just as little comprehension of what the
composer intended as I'd had all those years before. But soon, complex emotions that I never
knew poured out from my fingers, and suddenly I could understand why practice makes
perfect.
51. What is the writer’s main purpose in the passage?
A. To show the best time for learning. B. To describe his learning process.
C. To encourage adult learning. D. To explain his attitude to learning.
52. In paragraph 2, the phrase “For starters” means ……
A. For the new learners. B. At the beginning.
C. First and foremost. D. At the first time.
53. What can be inferred about young learners from the first paragraph of the passage?
A. They are usually lazy in their class.
B. They shouldn’t be given less homework.
C. They often lack a good motivation for learning.
D. They should be encouraged to study more by their parents.
54. According to the passage, young people ____________ .
A. consider homework as a pleasure.
B. are indifferent to social activities.
C. are more frightened to ask questions than adults.
D. Learn new knowledge easier than adult learners.
55. In paragraph 2, what is the writer’s attitude towards learning?
A. sympathetic B. pessimistic C. optimistic D. energetic
56. The word “rusty” in paragraph 3 is closest in meaning to “____________”?
A. impatient because it’s too difficult to do
B. covered with rust and become useless
C. become worse because of lack of practice
D. not as good as it used to be because of frequent use
57. In paragraph 4, the phrase “get there” means “____________”?
A. reach your goal with hard work B. have the certificate of your abilities
C. go to the place you have long desired D. receive an acceptance from someone
58. The word “it” in the first line of the last paragraph refers to ____________ .
A. piano lesson B. music C. school D. exercise
59. Which is TRUE according to the pasage?
A. Adults think more dependently flexibly than young people.
B. can learn from their experience in doing other things.
C. Young people usually feel less patient than adults.
D. Adult leaners have fewer advantages than young leaners.
60. According to the passage, when you learn later in life, you ____________ .
A. should expect to take longer to learn than when you were younger.
B. find that you can recall a lot of things you learnt when younger.
C. can sometimes understand more than when you were younger.
D. are not able to concentrate as well as when you were younger.
Part 2: In the passage below, five paragraphs have been removed. For questions 71-77,
read the passage and choose from the paragraphs A-F the one which fits each gap.
There are one extra paragraph which you do not need to use. (7 pts)
THE ROBOTS ARE COMING - OR ARE THEY?
What is the current state of play in Artificial Intelligence?
Can robots advance so far that they become the ultimate threat to our existence? Some
scientists say no, and dismiss the very idea of Artificial Intelligence. The human brain, they
argue, is the most complicated system ever created, and any machine designed to reproduce
human thought is bound to fail. Physicist Roger Penrose of Oxford University and others
believe that machines are physically incapable of human thought.
71. ____________
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is different from most technologies in that scientists still
understand very little about how intelligence works. Physicists have a good understanding of
Newtonian mechanics and the quantum theory of atoms and molecules, whereas the basic
laws of intelligence remain a mystery. But a sizeable number of mathematicians and computer
scientists, who are specialists in the area, are optimistic about the possibilities.
72. ____________
In the 1950s and 1960s great progress was made, but the shortcomings of these prototype
robots soon became clear. They were huge and took hours to navigate across a room.
Meanwhile, a fruit fly, with a brain containing only a fraction of the computing power, can
effortlessly navigate in three dimensions.
73. ____________
The second problem is robots' lack of common sense. Humans know that water is wet and that
mothers are older than their daughters. But there is no mathematics that can express these
truths. 74. ____________
Because of the limitations of the top-down approach to Artificial Intelligence, attempts have
been made to use a 'bottom-up' approach instead - that is, to try to imitate evolution and the
way a baby learns. Rodney Brooks was the director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence laboratory,
famous for its lumbering 'topdown' walking robots. He changed the course of research when
he explored the unorthodox idea of tiny 'insectoid' robots that learned to walk by bumping
into things instead of computing mathematically the precise position of their feet. Today
many of the descendants of Brooks' insectoid robots are on Mars gathering data for NASA
(The National Aeronautics and Space Administration), running across the dusty landscape of
the planet. For all their successes in mimicking the behaviour of insects, however, robots
using neural networks have performed miserably when their programmers have tried to
duplicate in them the behaviour of higher organisms such as mammals.
75. ____________
There are people who believe that eventually there will be a combination between the top-
down and bottom-up, which may provide the key to Artificial Intelligence. As adults, we
blend the two approaches. It has been suggested that our emotions represent the quality that
most distinguishes us as human, that it is impossible for machines ever to have emotions.
Computer expert Hans Moravec thinks that in the future robots will be programmed with
emotions such as fear to protect themselves so that they can signal to humans when their
batteries are running low, for example. Emotions are vital in decision-making. People who
have suffered a certain kind of brain injury lose the ability to experience emotions and
become unable to make decisions.
76. ____________
There is no universal consensus as to whether machines can be conscious, or even, in human
terms, what consciousness means. Minsky suggests the thinking process in our brain is not
localised but spread out, with different centres competing with one another at any given time.
Consciousness may then be viewed as a sequence of thoughts and images issuing from these
different, smaller 'minds', each one competing for our attention. Robots might eventually
attain a 'silicon consciousness',
77. ____________
A. To them it is only a matter of time before a thinking machine walks out of the laboratory.
Over the years, various problems have impeded all efforts to create robots. To attack these
difficulties, researchers tried to use the 'top-down approach', using a computer in an attempt to
program all the essential rules onto a single disc. By inserting this into a machine, it would
then become self-aware and attain human-like intelligence.
B. MIT's Marvin Minsky summarises the problems of AI: 'The history of AI is sort of funny
because the first real accomplishments were beautiful things, like a machine that could do
well in a maths course. But then we started to try to make machines that could answer
questions about simple children's stories. There's no machine today that can do that.'
C. Robots, in fact, might one day embody an architecture for thinking and processing
information that is different from ours - but also indistinguishable. If that happens, the
question of whether they really 'understand' becomes largely irrelevant. A robot that has
perfect mastery of syntax, for all practical purposes, understands what is being said.
D. Colin McGinn of Rutgers University backs this up when he says that Artificial Intelligence
is like sheep trying to do complicated psychoanalysis. They just don't have the conceptual
equipment they need in their limited brains'.
E. Children learn the intuitive laws of biology and physics by interacting with the real world.
Robots know only what has been programmed into them.
F. Without emotions to guide them, they debate endlessly over their options. Moravec points
out that as robots become more intelligent and are able to make choices, they could likewise
become paralysed with indecision. To aid them, robots of the future might need to have
emotions hardwired into their brains.
G. Dr Stella Pachidi from Cambridge Judge Business School believes that some of the most
fundamental changes are happening as a result of the ‘algorithmication’ of jobs that are
dependent on data rather than on production – the so-called knowledge economy. Algorithms
are capable of learning from data to undertake tasks that previously needed human judgement,
such as reading legal contracts, analysing medical scans and gathering market intelligence.
H. Our brains, like the fruit fly's, unconsciously recognise what we see by performing
countless calculations. This unconscious awareness of patterns is exactly what computers are
missing.
Part 3:
What is personality?
A We are all familiar with the idea that different people have different personalities,
but what does this actually mean? It implies that different people behave in
different ways, but it must be more than that. After all, different people find
themselves in different circumstances, and much of their behaviour follows from
this fact. However, our common experience reveals that different people respond
in quite remarkably different ways even when faced with roughly the same
circumstances. Alan might be happy to live alone in a quiet and orderly cottage, go
out once a week, and stay in the same job for thirty years, whilst Beth likes
nothing better than exotic travel and being surrounded by vivacious friends and
loud music.
B In cases like these, we feel that it cannot be just the situation which is producing
the differences in behaviour. Something about the way the person is ‘wired up’
seems to be at work, determining how they react to situations, and, more than that,
the kind of situations they get themselves into in the first place. This is why
personality seems to become stronger as we get older; when we are young, our
situation reflects external factors such as the social and family environment we
were born into. As we grow older, we are more and more affected by the
consequences of our own choices (doing jobs that we were drawn to, surrounded
by people like us whom we have sought out). Thus, personality differences that
might have been very slight at birth become dramatic in later adulthood.
C Personality, then, seems to be the set of enduring and stable dispositions that
characterise a person. These dispositions come partly from the expression of
inherent features of the nervous system, and partly from learning. Researchers
sometimes distinguish between temperament, which refers exclusively to
characteristics that are inborn or directly caused by biological factors, and
personality, which also includes social and cultural learning. Nervousness, for
example, might be a factor of temperament, but religious piety is an aspect of
personality.
D The discovery that temperamental differences are real is one of the major findings
of contemporary psychology. It could easily have been the case that there were no
intrinsic differences between people in temperament, so that given the same
learning history, the same dilemmas, they would all respond in much the same
way. Yet we now know that this is not the case.
E Personality measures turn out to be good predictors of your health, how happy you
typically are - even your taste in paintings. Personality is a much better predictor
of these things than social class or age. The origin of these differences is in part
innate. That is to say, when people are adopted at birth and brought up by new
families, their personalities are more similar to those of their blood relatives than
to the ones they grew up with.
F Personality differences tend to manifest themselves through the quick, gut-feeling,
intuitive and emotional systems of the human mind. The slower, rational,
deliberate systems show less variation in output from person to person. Deliberate
rational strategies can be used to override intuitive patterns of response, and this is
how people wishing to change their personalities or feelings have to go about it.
As human beings, we have the unique ability to look in at our personality from the
outside and decide what we want to do with it.
G So what are the major ways personalities can differ? The dominant approach is to
think of the space of possible personalities as being defined by a number of
dimensions. Each person can be given a location in the space by their scores on all
the different dimensions. Virtually all theories agree on two of the main
dimensions, neuroticism (or negative emotionality) and extroversion (or positive
emotionality). However they differ on how many additional ones they recognise.
Among the most influential proposals are openness, conscientiousness and
agreeableness. In the next section I shall examine these five dimensions.
The passage has seven paragraphs. Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from
the list of headings below. Write the correct answer, i-x, in boxes 78-83 on your answer
sheet. There are three extra headings which you do not need to use.
List of Headings
i. A degree of control
ii. Where research has been carried out into the effects of family on
personality
iii. Categorising personality features according to their origin
iv. A variety of reactions in similar situations
v. A link between personality and aspects of our lives that aren’t chosen
vi. A possible theory that cannot be true
vii. Measuring personality
viii. Potentially harmful effects of emotions
ix. How our lives can reinforce our personalities
x. Differences between men's and women's personalities
Questions 84-90
Do the following statements reflect the claims of the
writer?
Write
YES if the statement reflects the claims of the writer
NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
84. Alan and Beth illustrate contrasting behaviour in similar situations.
85. As we grow older, we become more able to analyse our personalities.
86. Nervousness is an example of a learned characteristic.
87. The discovery of differences in temperament has changed the course of psychological
research.
88. Adopted children provide evidence that we inherit more of our personality than we
acquire.
89. The rational behaviour of different people shows greater similarity than their emotional
behaviour.
90. Most psychologists agree on the five major dimensions of personality.
There is little to disagree about in the notion that a good voice, whether in opera or rock
music, is one which moves its audience and brings a sense of release and (101) __________
to the singer. But contemporary pop and rock music have come about due to (102)
____________ advances in technology. Here, the impact of the microphone should not be
(103) _________ , as it has enabled the (104) _________ of quiet, intimate sounds. This, in
turn, allows the singer to experiment with the emphasis on mood rather than on strict (105)
__________ to proper breathing and voice control. Donna Soto-Morettin, a rock and jazz
vocal trainer, feels that (106) _________ reasons may account for the raspy sound produced
by certain rock singers. Her (107) ________ is that swollen vocal cords, which do not close
properly, may allow singers to produce deeper notes. She does not, however, regard this as
detracting (108) __________ produced. Singing, she maintains, has an almost (109)
_________from the value of the sound quality and so our response to it has more (110)
________ than its technical qualities.