Section B
Passage One
Mount Kilimanjaro is the highest point on the entire African continent. Located in the Northeast in Tanzania in east Africa, Mount Kilimanjaro is about equal distant from Cairo to the north and Cape Town to the south around 220 miles south of the equator. The majestic snow-cap peaks of Kilimanjaro have long captured the world's imagination. Thousands have traveled in Tanzania to climb the mountain, for the view of its famous glacier-covered peak. One such visitor, the American author Earnest Hemmingway even wrote a story about it. In the snows of Kilimanjaro, Hemmingway described the mountain's ice fields as great, high and unbelievable white in the sun. As spectacularly as it is to see the ice on top of Mount Kilimanjaro serves much more important purpose. Formed more than 11, 000 years ago, the glaciers are vital source of drinking and farming water for those who live in the surroundingareas. But for the last century the snows have been disappearing. Kilimanjaro’s glaciers have shrunk by more than 80% since 1912. There are several periods just as to why Mount KIlimanjaro's snow is disappearing so quickly. For one thing, the mountain is located in the tropical region. For this reason, its glaciers are especially vulnerable to climate changes. One type of climate changes is called globe warming which is caused in constant rise in the earth temperature. Another possible reason of glaciers melting is deforestation, which happens when trees are cut down in mass quantities. Trees keep the air cooler and add moister to the atmosphere which helps create clouds and precipitation. Experts predict the mountain's glaciers could disappear completely by the year 2020.
Questions 26 to 29 are based on the passage you have just heard.
26. Where is the highest point of the American continent?
27. What is the main attraction of Kilimanjaro?
28. Which statement is NOT true?
29. Which one does not account for the disappearing glacier at the peak?
Passage Two
Now hold the Grande Cappuccino, the coffee chain Starbucks has been forced to close its branch in Beijing's Forbidden City. The company said the decision to close had been congenial, but since the café opened 7 years ago, it's become the target of an increasingly widespread protest campaign, claiming it tramples over Chinese culture. However, Starbucks was here by invitation, the authorities who run the Forbidden City – Beijing's enormous 15th-century imperial palace complex, encouraged the small, almost invisible franchise of the global chain to open in 2000, a sign of a modern outward looking China as it prepared for the Olympics in 2008. But within weeks, the shop was the target of vehement opposition; a blight, it was said, on the Chinese cultural treasure and world heritage site. Tourists too, seemed to find it at best a curiosity. The campaign to remove the café took off earlier this year when a blog by influential Chinese newsreader Rui Chenggang in which he called on Starbucks to pull out was featured heavily in the media. Thousands supported his stands and museum managers eventually bowed to the pressure.
Questions 30 to 32 are based on the passage you have just heard.
30. When the company decided to close Starbucks in Forbidden City, how was the decision making? A
31. Which statement is NOT true? B
33. Why did Starbucks come into Forbidden City in the first place? B
Passage Three
Many college students find college courses not as interesting as they expect. Far too many courses rely principally or entirely on lectures, an arrangement much loved by faculty and administrators but scarcely designed to benefit the students. One problem with lectures is that listening intelligently is hard work. Reading the same material in a textbook is a more efficient way to learn because students can proceed as slowly as they need to until the subject matter becomes clear to them. Even simply paying attention is very difficult; people can listen at a rate of four hundred to six hundred words a minute, while the most impassionate professors talks at scarcely a third of that speed. The time lag between speech and comprehension leads to daydreaming. Many students believe years of watching television have sabotaged their attention span, but their real problem is that listening attentively is much harder than they think. Worse still, attending lectures is passivelearning, at least for inexperienced listeners. Active learning, in which students write essays or perform experiments and then have their work evaluated by an instructor, is far more beneficial for those who have not yet fully learned how to learn. While it’s true that techniques of active listening, such as trying to anticipate the speaker’s next point or taking notes selectively, can enhance the value of a lecture, few students possess such skills at the beginning of their college careers. More commonly, students try to write everything down and even bring tape recorders to class in a clumsy effort to capture every word.
Questions 33 to 35 are based on the passage you have just heard.
33. What is an example of passive learning?
34. Which influences student’s attention span?
35. Which of the following can be implied from the passage?
Section C
Scientists have identified three main causes of anorexia. Experts attribute the rise in cases of anorexia to the pressure in our society to be thin. The media constantly bombards us with images of thin people as ideals. Fat-free products and diet aids have become multimillion-dollar industries. These images and these industries project the idea that being anything but slender is something to be feared and shunned.
The second major factor in causing anorexia is the personality of the victim. Many of them are overachievers or perfectionists. They excel in school and a variety of extracurricular activities. Anorexics see being thin as a way to please others. In fact, they limit their food intake to fulfill expectationsof perfection from family and friends.
Thirdly, when anorexics don’t eat, they experience a rise in their level of opiates, natural brain chemicals that produce a sense of happiness. When anorexics do eat, their bodies produce higher than normal levels of a certain brain chemical that causes a sense of anxiety. These chemical changes make anorexia as physically addictive for the anorexic as alcohol for the alcoholic.
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