I.

READING

II. GUIDED CLOZE: Read the text below and decide which answer best fits each space.

Most adult humans around the world are lactose-intolerant, meaning that, once they were (41)
from breast milk, they gradually lost the ability to consume animal milk and certain other dairy
products without having digestive problems. However, the majority of people of European descent,
especially those of northern and central European descent, are able to digest milk (42)
infancy. This lactose tolerance is thought to
be due to a genetic mutation leading to a (43) gene for lactase persistence (the enzyme
lactase breaks down the milk sugar lactose in the small intestine).
There are several theories as to how this mutation became common enough to (44) in a
population. One idea has to do with famines and liquid milk. Thousands of years ago, millennia before
refrigeration, animal milk would quickly turn to yogurt in warm climates, allowing lactose-intolerant
humans to eat a nutritious and calorie-rich food (bacteria break down the lactose in yogurt, so even
lactose-intolerant people can usually enjoy it). However, in the cool climates that prevail in northern
Europe, the milk would have stayed fresh longer (45) into yogurt. In times of famine there,
desperate people may have consumed the milk and, being unable to digest the lactose, suffered from
diarrhea, possibly dying as a result of the combination of starvation and the (46) of
lactose intolerance. Those lucky few in the population who had the lactase mutation would have
survived with the (47) of nutrition from milk and then would have (48)
the gene for lactase persistence to their offspring. It is possible that, with enough (49) _
of famine, death, and the survival of milk drinkers, the lactase mutation became less rare in the
population. If you can drink milk as an adult, (50)
a milkshake to your genetically lucky ancestors who may have lived through some very
scary times to make lactose tolerance possible.

41. A. waned B. inhibited C. hindered D. weaned

42. A. past B. throughout C. beyond D. post
43. A. principal B. key C. dominant D. essential
44. A. keep up B. persist C. develop D. hold on
45. A. if fermented B. but ferment C. than ever D. rather than
fermenting fermenting
46. A. ravages B. savages C. sabotages D. declines
47. A. growth B. boost C. upgrade D. enhancement
48. A. given off B. carried over C. passed on D. handed down
49. A. circles B. rounds C. cycles D. recurrence
50. A. raise B. toast C. grant D. bow

III. Read the text below and choose the best answer to each question.

CAFFEINE
It isn’t known precisely why two runners died while running in 2011, one in the full marathon and
one in the half-marathon. The full marathoner fell right before reaching the finish line; the half-
marathoner collapsed after passing beyond the line. This specific form of death has become common
enough that it’s now reported in the same format: name, age, where they collapsed, and race
experience.
 Most studies about why these deaths occur have focused on the heart, and how it changes during
strenuous activity. But the packets handed out by those race volunteers could be another factor as to
why these deaths are so similar, and why heart attacks claim runners who’d had no prior cardiac
problems and who’d previously completed multiple marathons without incident.
 Caffeine is the most commonly used psychoactive drug in the world. Yes, it is a drug, and it can be
addictive. Caffeine stimulates the central nervous system and increases heart rate. It also boosts
dopamine levels in the same way as heroin, but at a much lower level. If taken in moderate doses,
caffeine typically isn’t dangerous.
Studies have shown that caffeine can also do a body good. It can increase brain function, lower the
risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes, and reduce the risk or onset of certain Parkinson’s disease.
It’s also an antioxidant. I drink coffee every day, as do 63 percent of Americans.
Endurance athletes rely on caffeine for specific purposes. Coffee has a laxative effect, which is
important before heading out on a long run, and research has shown that taking in some caffeine before
or during exercise can improve finish times in races. A lot of runners use caffeine before and during
races and handle it fine.
As headline-grabbing as these deaths are, they aren’t common. A New England Journal of Medicine
study looked at marathon deaths from January 1, 2000, through May 31, 2010, and found the rate of
cardiac death to be extremely low: one per every 259,000 runners who complete marathons and half-
marathons.
That seems like an awfully small number, subject to statistical chance and not a direct cause-and-
effect relationship. But the basis for a direct connection has become increasingly sound, and people are
consuming caffeine before and during races at a rate far above anything considered safe. And because
it’s preventable and avoidable, each of these deaths could be seen as one too many.
Starting three years ago, the International Marathon Medical Directors Association (IMMDA) has
warned runners to ingest no more than 200 mg of caffeine before and during any race, based on
research that has shown that during exercise, caffeine affects the heart in ways that can send someone
into cardiac arrest. “Every incident is disturbing,” says Dr. Lewis G. Maharam, chairman of the board
of governors for the IMMDA and medical director of the Leukemia Lymphoma Society’s Team in
Training.
Despite the IMMDA recommendation and the regular reporting on race deaths, caffeine remains a
safe energy boost in the eyes of many runners. I found no evidence to suggest that the companies that
make these caffeine- laden products are encouraging unsafe levels of consumption, but neither are all
of these products labeled to indicate appropriate limits during endurance events. Nor is there much
education by the companies, running magazines, races, or government about how to track one’s total
intake of caffeine during extended exertion. Every individual is left to his or her own calculations.
And running is a big business now. Marathons had about 500,000 finishers last year; half-marathons
had 1.85 million. A good business plan for any of these companies would have their product appealing
to these runners, especially when some studies show that caffeine can make you faster.
But that research has been extrapolated too far, in both how these products are marketed and how
we, the runners, take them in. I’m tired of hearing about dead runners. We should start treating caffeine
for what it is: a drug that, during exercise, could affect your heart.
1. What is the writer implying in the second paragraph?
A. There is no connection between these deaths and the consumption of
caffeine.
B. That caffeine products given by race organizers could play a part in these
deaths.
C. The people involved in the business of marathons have hushed things up.
D. The government would prefer this subject was not publicized too much.
2. According to the writer in the fourth paragraph, there are two sides to caffeine because _
 A. the consumption of caffeine can have some beneficial
effects.
B. caffeine can make a runner faster.
C. caffeine can relax the mind and help increase
concentration.
D. caffeine can help fight infections.
3. In the fifth paragraph, the writer suggests that runners have an affinity for caffeine because
A. it makes running more exciting. B. it makes running more demanding.
C. it makes running more stimulating D. it makes running more comfortable.
4. What is the writer’s opinion in the seventh paragraph of the propensity of marathon deaths?
 A. The number is surprisingly low. B. The number is much too high.
C. The number is difficult to believe. D. The number is not surprising.
5. What dilemma does the writer highlight in paragraph 9?
A. Caffeine can be both healthy and harmful for the human body.
B. The companies making caffeine products did nothing to aggravate the problem, but neither did
they do
anything to alleviate it.
C. Runners who want to avoid caffeine cannot because they become addicted.
D. That though adults are reducing their caffeine intake, young people are consuming more.
6. What advice is the writer giving by writing this article?
A. People should understand the true nature of
caffeine.
B. People should avoid caffeine at all costs.
C. That the dangers of caffeine are exaggerated.
D. That caffeine can improve running performance.
7. The word ‘extrapolated’ is closest in meaning to .
A. discovered B. guessed C. exaggerated D. anticipated

IV. Read the text below and choose the best answer to each question.

IS OBJECTIVE REALITY A MYTH

It’s easy to think that our visual experience or the fundamental concepts within society are
objectively true, and there is good cause for this way of thinking to be desirable. It helps us to realise
that we are not alone and have a shared experience, and it aids us in organising the abundance of
information we receive as human beings. However, the idea of one objective reality is more debateable
than you may think. Throughout history, shared beliefs have been disproved, and that we can perceive
images moving on a television screen, when really it is a series of dots changing colour, indicates that
visual perception can be deceiving.
Our shared realities, certainly in the modern Western world, are centred on material things that we
can touch, the objectivity of science and humans, and our individual growth. Historian Greg Anderson
claims that these principles are essentially an exception in the history of civilization. Before the
Industrial Revolution, almost all western societies saw reality as quite a different set of concepts. Their
worlds depended on things that today we might consider ‘unreal’, such as entities that control nature,
and humans’ lives were dictated by this. It was considered in the same way that we regard science
today. In addition, many societies held little belief in ‘the individual’, as the individual was deemed
inseparable from the family unit, which worked together as a whole to survive. And as these
civilisations, in some form or other, continued in this way for several centuries, we should be sceptical
that we, with our modern perception of life, know better.
However, reality is deeper than just a set of shared beliefs – reality is also a set of truths. The idea
that there are ‘known facts’ and ‘unknown facts’ is something with which we all should probably
reconcile ourselves in the modern world. Take the internet, for instance. While it is useful for looking
up undisputed knowledge, for example that Paris is the capital of France, or that the Sun is our nearest
star, there is also much more dubious information out there. This is evidenced in doctored photos or
misrepresented figures that are placed online, and some people take this misinformation as fact, simply
because they have blindly trusted it to be true, or because it has confirmed a belief that they already
held.
Even our senses do not escape from this controversy surrounding an objective reality. One key
example of this is the placebo effect, which not only occurs in medical or clinical trials, but in
everyday situations too. Placebos
– in other words medicines that appear to be a real but in reality aren’t – are often used in clinical trials
as a way to measure drug effects, yet sometimes patients’ symptoms appear to improve when taking
placebos and not the real drugs. Even our vision, as cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman explains, often
misrepresents the truth to us because our brains have to make sense of the received visual data. He uses
the example of a train to show how this works. We think we all know what a train is exactly, but
physicists would tell you a train is merely a collection of moving particles, particles that we have given
a label in order to attach shared, and indispensable, meanings to the object. Optical illusions provide
yet further evidence of how our brains organise visuals to offer some kind of
meaning that is essentially false. Such illusions include the Ponzo depth-perception illusion, in which
two identical lines appear to be different sizes when viewed in conjunction with converging track lines
going into the distance.
So, whatever our experience of the world, the signs are that it is filled with subjectivity in a way that
perhaps we didn’t quite imagine before. Science moves on and theories that once were taken as fact are
disproved, our beliefs are subject to the modern world we live in and its values, the internet is littered
with untruths, and our minds can play tricks on us. Therefore, to be as bold as to say ‘our way is best’
is perhaps a little conceited. We know as much as our brains allow and our physical context tells us.
1. In the first paragraph, what does the writer suggest about the human relationship with objective truth?
A. It is something we subconsciously know is largely inaccurate.
B. It helps us to construct common meaning from what we
experience.
C. It is a tool for bonding with other humans around us.
D. It is hard for us to tell whether something is objectively real.
2. What does the article tell us about past views of common realities in paragraph 2?
A. They were inaccurate.
B. They slowly evolved.
C. They had longevity.
D. They became
illogical.
3. In the third paragraph, how does the writer feel about information on the internet?
A. We should attempt to establish the accuracy of
information.
B. We believe only what we choose to believe.
C. We need to be less trusting of what we read
D. We should live with the varied quality of information.
4. The writer uses the placebo effect to show us _
A. the limits of our senses.
B. the benefits of thinking
positively.
C. the drawbacks of medical trials.
D. the power of pure belief.
5. What does Donald Hoffman think about the way we interpret reality?
A. It serves a purpose.
B. It aids communication.
C. It is a brain deficiency.
D. It impedes our
understanding.
6. How does the writer summarise their attitude to what we think is real?
A. We need to try to understand the environment around
us.
B. We aren’t as all-knowing as we deem ourselves to be.
C. We still have a lot to learn about objective reality.
D. We should give ourselves up to life’s ambiguities.
Tropical Cyclones
My dad didn’t have to tell me the storm could have killed him. Instead, I heard it in his details: water
was leaking into the plane’s tail section, crewmen were lighting cigarettes for pilots too focused to
light up themselves, and the aircraft was bucking like a jeep driving over the rutted roads back in
Guam.
14.
 My dad was sitting in the plane’s midsection recording wind speed, barometric pressure, and
temperature from the shaking dials and gauges. In the cockpit, the pilots were fighting to reach the
storm’s eye to pinpoint its location.
15.
What a sensation! Was I dreaming? It was calm with just the noise of the plane’s engines. The ceiling
of cirrus clouds was very high. There was a ring of thick clouds forming the eye of the storm.
Unfortunately, reaching the center of the storm was only half the flight. The pilots had to head back to
Guam, and the plane was running low on fuel.
16.
It’s now possible to call up the predicted paths of active tropical cyclones on a Web site; knowing
when one
storm will fizzle but another will become a Hurricane Katrina remains tricky.
17.
As I stand on the tarmac of the NASA Wallops Flight Facility, a strong breeze sends the Atlantic’s
warm and humid salt air across an almost empty runway. In front of me is a 50-foot-long gloss-white
plane that is a mishmash of parts. A turbofan engine on top of the aircraft splits a V-shaped rear tail.
18.
Of course, no one has to worry about the view. The plane is a Global Hawk unmanned autonomous
vehicle, better
known as a drone. NASA received its two drones as hand-me-downs from the large Air Force
surveillance fleet. Instead of loading the planes with payloads to watch over North Korea or track
terrorists in Afghanistan, NASA reworked the drones to observe tropical cyclones.
19.
The drone can also reach altitudes almost three times as high as the Orion. That’s about five miles higher
than a
typical cruising altitude for a passenger airliner. From that altitude, the scientists back at Wallops can
see the entirety of the storms.
The Hawk’s altitude, reach, and flight time over the storm enable scientists to claw deeper into tropical
cyclones to find out why and how they evolve. The bullet points of storm formation are well known to
researchers.
20.
My father and his crew did make it out of that storm, but, without enough fuel to fly back to Guam,
the pilot
diverted to Tokyo. After landing, the crew headed downtown. Meanwhile, back over the darkened
Pacific, nature was still churning the ocean, daring future flyers to discover the tropical cyclone’s secrets.

V. List of paragraphs:

A. Attached on each side are long, lean wings that remind me of blades from a wind farm turbine. The
front is ugly, a bulbous nose with no windows - just a blank slate.
B. But the wind and rain kept punching back like a heavyweight champ, jabbing at the plane’s
aluminum skin. Then the winds stopped; the plane was in the eye. The image painted by my father in
his diary was accurate.
C. A tropical cyclone begins in the Atlantic with a few gusts of wind over warm equatorial water. From
there it grows from disturbance to depression to storm, and finally, when sustained winds hit 74 mph,
it’s labeled a hurricane.
D. There is no wheel to fly the plane like in my father’s aircraft. Instead, at the pilots’ station, Neuhaus
and his fellow flyers control the Global Hawk with a keyboard and a mouse. The pilots select the flight
plan by clicking waypoints on the screen like measuring distance on Google Maps. This instructs the
plane to fly from Point A to Point B to Point C. The pilots do not operate the plane’s control flaps;
onboard software does that.
E. From an airstrip on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, scientists are continuing to try to solve that riddle.
This time, they are using technology better known from the battlefields of Afghanistan than from
broadcasts of the Weather Channel.
 F. Earlier that day in July 1947, my father and his fellow US Navy typhoon chasers
had taken off from Naval Air Station Agana on a mission to track a growing tropical
cyclone. After flying several hundred miles north, their converted World War II
bomber bounced in the air just 500 feet over a roiling Pacific.
G. That was the mission of the typhoon chasers: go into and get out of the types of
storms that kill. Tropical cyclones - the strongest of which are called typhoons in the
Pacific, hurricanes in the Atlantic, and just cyclones in the Indian Ocean - have
taken the lives of over a million people since the time of my dad’s flight in 1947.
H. The planes joined five other types of hurricane hunting aircraft - these managed
by NOAA - including the P- 3 Orion, a ‘60s-era propeller-driven aircraft, and the
Gulfstream IV jet, a private plane of the type Tom Cruise uses to dart around the
world.

VI. OPEN CLOZE (20 PTS): Fill in each gap with ONE word to make a meaningful
passage.

Arrival at a destination is often thought to be the prime purpose of travel these

days. (1) in this way, the journey itself is
not the point; (2) it is the serious business of
transporting our bodies from one place to another. Getting to the end location as
quickly as possible is the requirement and nowadays this is possible almost
instantaneously thanks to travelling tubes called aeroplanes. In other words, it is only
since flying became the most popular means of long-distance travel for both leisure
and business purposes (3) _ journeys have ceased to be of
intrinsic (4) to the majority of those
travelling. While we no longer need to worry about food, accommodation or changes
of clothing during today’s journeys, we are no longer in a
(5) to enjoy the geographical and cultural differences between the places
we pass through on our journeys.
Of course there are those for whom travel is an end in (6) , a minority,
who enjoy the journey to their destination more than their (7) . These people
might deliberately choose a sea voyage lasting two weeks in (8) to a long-haul
flight. These travellers belong to a generation of romantics from a bygone age.
Sadly, the many cultural differences that once (9) our world and
made it a fascinating place to travel through have now all (10) disappeared.