Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the sentence that is closest in meaning to each of the following questions. 

The living room isn’t as big as the kitchen

A. The living room is bigger than the kitchen

B. The kitchen is smaller than the living room

C. The kitchen is bigger than the living room

D. The kitchen is not bigger than the living room

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on answer sheet to  indicate the word whose underlined part differs from the other three in pronunciation in each of the following questions

A. handcraft

B. handbook

C. handkerchief

D. handbag

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions.

What picture do you have of the future? Will life in the future be better, worse or the same as now? What do you hope about the future?

Futurologists predict that life will probably be very different in 2050 in all the fields, from entertainment to technology. First of all, it seems that TV channels will have disappeared. Instead, people will choose a program from a 'menu' and a computer will send the program directly to the television. Today, we can use the World Wide Web to read newspaper stories and see pictures on a computer thousands of kilometers away. By 2050, music, films, programs, newspapers and books will come to us by computer.

In what concerns the environment, water will have become one of our most serious problems. In many places, agriculture is changing and farmers are growing fruit and vegetables to export. This uses a lot of water. Demand for water will increase ten times between now and 2050 and there could be serious shortages. Some futurologists predict that water could be the cause of war if we don't act now.

In transport, cars running on new, clean fuels will have computers to control the speed and there won't be any accidents. Today, many cars have computers that tell drivers exactly where they are. By 2050, the computer will control the car and drive it to your destination. On the other hand, space planes will take people halfway around the world in two hours. Nowadays, the United States Shuttle can go into space and land on Earth again. By 2050, space planes will fly all over the world and people will fly from Los Angeles to Tokyo in just two hours.

In the domain of technology, robots will have replaced people in factories. Many factories already use robots. Big companies prefer robots - they do not ask for pay rises or go on strike, and they work 24 hours a day. By 2050, we will see robots everywhere - in factories, schools, offices, hospitals, shops and homes.

Last but not least, medicine technology will have conquered many diseases. Today, there are electronic devices that connect directly to the brain to help people hear. By 2050, we will be able to help blind and deaf people see and hear again. Scientists have discovered how to control genes. They have already produced clones of animals. By 2050, scientists will be able to produce clones of people and decide how they look, how they behave and how much intelligence they have. 

The word "conquered" in the last paragraph is closest in meaning to ______________. 

A. controlled 

B. diagnosed 

C. transmitted 

D. caused 

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 35 to 42.

How is the news different from entertainment? Most people would answer that news is real but entertainment is fiction. However, if we think more carefully about the news, it becomes clear that the news is not always real. The news does not show us all the events of the day, but stories from a small number of chosen events. The creation of news stories is subject to specific constraints, much like the creation of works of fiction. There are many constraints, but three of the most important ones are: commercialism, story formulas, and sources. Newspapers, radio, and TV stations are businesses, all of which are rivals for audiences and advertising revenue. The amount of time that the average TV station spends on news broadcasts has grown steadily over the last fifty years - largely because news is relatively cheap to produce, yet sells plenty of advertising. Some news broadcasts are themselves becoming advertisements. For example, during one week in 1996 when the American CBS network was airing a movie about the sinking of the Titanic, CBS news ran nine stories about that event (which had happened 84 years before). The ABC network is owned by Disney Studios, and frequently runs news stories about Mickey Mouse. Furthermore, the profit motive drives news organizations to pay more attention to stories likely to generate a large audience, and to shy away from stories that may be important but dull. This pressure to be entertaining has produced shorter, simpler stories: more focus on celebrities than people of substance, more focus on gossip than on news, and more focus on dramatic events than on nuanced issues.

As busy people under relentless pressure to produce, journalists cannot spend days agonizing over the best way to present stories. Instead, they depend upon certain story formulas, which they can reuse again and again. One example is known as the inverted pyramid. In this formula, the journalist puts the most important information at the beginning of the story, than adds the next most important, and so on. The inverted pyramid originates from the age of the telegraph, the idea being that if the line went dead halfway through the story, the journalist would know that the most crucial information had at least been relayed. Modern journalists still value the formula for a similar reason. Their editors will cut stories if they are too long. Another formula involves reducing a complicated story into a simple conflict. The best example is "horse race" election coverage. Thorough explication of the issues and the candidates' views is forbiddingly complex. Journalists therefore concentrate more on who is winning in the opinion polls, and whether the underdog can catch up in the numbers than on politicians' campaign goals.

Sources are another constraint on what journalists cover and how they cover it. The dominant sources for news are public information officers in businesses and government offices. The majority of such officers try to establish themselves as experts who are qualified to feed information to journalists. How do journalists know who is an expert? In general, they don't. They use sources not on the basis of actual expertise, but on the

appearance of expertise and the willingness to share it. All the major news organizations use some of the same sources (many of them anonymous), so the same types of stories always receive attention. Over time, the journalists may even become close friends with their sources, and they stop searching for alternative points of view. The result tends to be narrow, homogenized coverage of the same kind.

It can be inferred from paragraph 1 that the author of the passage thinks _______.

A. that watching or reading the news is extremely boring

B. that most news stories are false

C. that most people don't realize how different news is from reality

D. that most people don't pay enough attention to the news

Mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the following questions.
In a formal interview, it is essential to maintain good eye _____ with the interviewers.

A. link

B. connection

C. touch

D. contact

Mark the letter A, B, C or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the following questions.
The players’ protests ________ no difference to the referee’s decision at all.

A. did

B. made

C. caused

D. created

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 45 to 50.

The Atmosphere of Venus

          Venus, also called the Morning Star and Evening Star, is the second-closest planet to the sun and the brightest object in the night sky. The planet orbits the sun every two hundred and twenty four Earth-days and is sometimes referred to as Earth’s sister planet because the two share both a similar size and bulk. What is not similar, however, is Venus’s atmosphere in comparison to Earth’s atmosphere.

          The atmosphere on Venus is much heavier and has a higher density than that of Earth. Venus’s atmosphere also expands significantly higher than Earth’s atmosphere although a thick cloud cover makes the surface of Venus nearly impossible to see unless observed through radar mapping.

          While the pressure and temperature of Venus’s upper atmosphere are comparable to those of Earth, the heat and pressure of the lower atmosphere are not unlike a furnace. Venus’s atmosphere is very thick due to a composition consisting mainly of carbon dioxide, and a small amount of nitrogen. If man could survive the extreme heat of Venus’s surface (400 degrees Celsius), then he would have to contend with a surface pressure that is more than 90 times that of Earth. Venus’s extremely high temperature is thanks to the greenhouse effect caused by such a large amount of carbon dioxide. The greenhouse effect is a process by which the sun’s infrared radiation is more readily absorbed by the atmosphere. Just like in a real greenhouse used to grow plants years round, the proliferation of carbon dioxide traps radiation and warms Venus’s atmosphere. Due to this phenomenon, Venus boasts a higher atmospheric temperature than Mercury, even though Venus is twice the distance from the sun.

          However, scientists postulate that Venus’s atmosphere was not always so hot. Studies show that large bodies of water were once on Venus’s surface but that eventually evaporation of all the water caused the runaway greenhouse effect which regulates the planet today.Thus Venus has become a critical study for today’s scientists, as human being are only beginning to struggle with the early stages of the greenhouse effect. Our problems do not stem from evaporated water supplies but from a propagation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases due to industrial and automobile emissions.

          Another interesting characteristic to note regarding Venus’s atmosphere is that its daytime temperatures and nighttime temperatures are not that far removed from each other. This is due to the thermal inertia, the ability of a substance to store heat despite changing temperatures and the transfer of heat by Venus’s strong winds. Although winds on the surface of Venus move slowly in comparison with Earth’s winds, Venus’s air is so dense that a slow-moving there can move large obstructions and even skip stones along the planet’s surface.

          In 1966, humankind made its first attempt at sending a recording instrument into Venus’s atmosphere. The Venera 3 probe did collide with Venus surface; however, the abrupt impact caused its communication system to fail, and it was unable to send and feedback. In 1967, Venera 4 successfully enter Venus’s atmosphere and was able to take many readings, one of which recorded that Venus’s atmosphere was between ninety and ninety-five percent carbon dioxide. Subsequent Venera probes were sent into Venus’s atmosphere, but most of them succumbed to the crushing air pressure.

According to paragraph 3, the greenhouse effect on Venus is owed to

A. the small amounts of nitrogen

B. the rapid increasing amounts of carbon dioxide

C. growing plants

D. the high atmospheric temperatures