Đề thi thử đội tuyển học sinh giỏi online (mock nec) lần 3

MockNEC Dec 2021
I. Listening (50 points)
Part 1. For questions 1–5, listen to a recording about a new Covid-19 strain and decide whether the following
statements are True (T), False (F), or Not Given (NG) according to what you hear.
1. The WHO believes that the Omicron has spread outside Africa.
2. Most of the Omicron’s mutations are concentrated in the area of the protein that interacts with human cells.
3. Jeremy Luban expressed some reservations about the accuracy of the data on Omicron’s communicability.
4. According to initial findings, patients recovered from previous Covid-19 strains are not prone to Omicron variants.
5. Clinical research has shown that vaccination is less effective against the Omicron.
Part 2. For questions 6–10, listen to a talk about solar energy and answer the questions. Write NO MORE
THAN FOUR WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER taken from the recording in each for each answer.
6. How much solar power does the Sahara Desert receive annually?
7. What attribute of sunlight inhibits the solar cells’ energy conversion efficiency?
8. What improvements have bolstered the photon-electron interactions in photovoltaic cells?
9. According to the recording, into what system can the concentrated solar plants be incorporated straightforwardly?
10. What is one deleterious process that massive batteries and clean gas have in common with conventional fuels?
Part 3. Listen to an interview about remote working and choose the correct answer A, B, C or D for questions 11–15.
11. What does Callum think about his current working life?
A. He regrets moving to full-time remote working.
B. He misses the feeling of going to the office.
C. He prefers a hybrid working environment.
D. He expects improved convenience of exchanging thoughts.
12. What does Vinjeru say about getting a new job?
A. She has been taken aback by certain features of office life.
B. Her experience disproved current ideas about remote hiring practices.
C. She could not commit her colleagues’ names to memory.
D. She did not feel like a fish out of water then.
13. What does Vinjeru find surprising about Apple?
A. its misaligned expectations
B. its relenting to employees’ requests
C. its staff members’ resignations
D. its employees’ expressed concerns
14. What Vinjeru says about race and people’s preferences for working offline and/or online most helps to
answer which of the following questions?
A. How much scholarly attention has the subject received?
B. Do most black employees find remote working more accessible?
C. What is the working mode preference of most white office employees in America?
D. How long is hybrid working expected to continue?
15. On the subject of productivity at work, what do Callum and Vinjeru disagree over?
A. whether it is better to be flexible in scheduling individual and team tasks
B. whether teams should choose their days in the office
C. whether employers and employees should reach a compromise
D. whether a neat division of labor is achievable 1
Part 4. For questions 16–25, listen to a recording about the Pandora papers and complete the following
sentences. Write NO MORE THAN FOUR WORDS taken from the recording for each blank.
A tax haven is deemed as a country or a (16) ______ where a number of tycoons can stash their properties and shirk
the responsibility of paying taxes. The reporters from the International (17) ______ helped bring their secrets to light.
South Dakota has become one of the first-line tax havens in the United States thanks to its (18) ______. One habitué,
Horst Happel, is a Brazilian orange juice industrialist who paid a large settlement to his government for (19) ______
local farmers. The state lawmakers, when considering the proposal to (20) ______ to pave the way for a tax haven,
believed that South Dakota’s prosperity would be aggrandized. However, that is just way off the mark.
The Pandora Papers also unmask how US citizens stash away their fortunes while they are facing probes or (21)
______. Poor reciprocity among governments and inadequate resources hinder (22) ______ from tracing offshore
transactions. Tax havens are, by their nature, bona fide; however, considering the moral principles and the worldwide
(23) ______, they turn out terribly dubious.
A Russian shop-cleaner, who was the long-time paramour of Vladimir Putin, has been found to be in possession of a Monaco-based (24) ______.
An estimated non-taxable $32 trillion, which is ten times the (25) ______, is how much the magnates and moguls have cached. II. LEXICO-GRAMMAR
Part 1. For questions 26–40, choose the correct answer A, B, C, or D to each of the following questions.
26. The high mountain marathon ended in disaster due to the unexpected ______ cold weather. A. piercingly B. unfailingly C. tumultuously D. uproariously
27. The ‘Rule of Law’ government system ensures that no one in the authority has the ______ to do whatever they want. A. cul-de-sac B. carte blanche C. fait accompli D. faux pas
28. Henry was a man of no fixed ______, roaming the streets of Dublin. A. epode B. geode C. anode D. abode
29. Due to the post-Covid-19 inflation, the country has sunk into a ______ of economic and political instability. A. mudlark B. quagmire C. sirocco D. squall
30. When the coffee shop doubled its prices, customers ______ and stopped going there. A. stuck their neck out B. washed their hands of it C. voted with their feet D. looked down their nose
31. They discovered the ancient tomb by pure ______; in fact, no archaeologists had been expecting anything valuable at that site. A. palpability B. morbidity C. serendipity D. culpability
32. While invigilating the online mid-term test yesterday, I noticed Henry cast a _____ glance at something under his desk. A. restive B. votive C. dative D. furtive
33. Adding vodka to this perfect cocktail recipe is far from the icing on the cake; in fact, you are gilding the ______ by doing so! A. lupin B. lily C. aster D. mallow
34. Henry has decided to conduct several surveys to get some data to ______ his research paper. A. churn out B. ink in C. flesh out D. pen up
35. As he was reading the Dear John letter, tears ______ in his eyes. A. welled up B. tanked up C. soaked up D. glammed up 2
36. To be honest, Henry’s essay is merely a pompous word ______ and does nothing more than beating around the bush. A. cocktail B. mélange C. salad D. potpourri
37. The conference was so boring that I tried to _____ out of the auditorium without my colleagues noticing. A. slither B. slink C. prowl D. strut
38. We may have to endure the long-term economical ______ of Covid-19 for a long time. A. backdraft B. backfire C. backwash D. backlash
39. Henry is in charge of organizing this contest; therefore, if anything turns sour, he has to ______. A. run the gamut B. keep the flag flying C. take the cake D. carry the can
40. It is a(n) ______ fact that vaccination is not the one-stop solution to the Covid-19 pandemic. A. axiomatic B. indolent C. frenetic D. languorous
Part 2. For questions 41–45, write the correct form of each bracketed word in each sentence.
41. He dismissed the whole plan as ______. (DOODLE)
42. He was born into a ______ family; therefore, he had an opportunity to attend the most prestigious private school
in the country. (BLOOD)
43. ______ broke out after the authorities failed to reach an agreement with the protesters, and the army was
deployed to control the situation. (DEMON)
44. When going on business trip, Henry enjoys staying in luxurious hotels that offer ______ suites. (POINT)
45. After a year of thorough ______, they agreed to get a divorce. (SEARCH)
III. READING (50 points)
Part 1. For questions 46–55, read the passage and fill each of the following numbered blanks with ONE suitable word.
A detective story is by definition (46)_________ in which a crime, whose perpetrator remains mysterious, is
solved by a detective through his collection and logical interpretation of existing evidence, or clues. In practice,
however, much variation occurs, and the story (47)_________ into the broader category of the mystery story
(48)_________ it feature no investigator or an (49)_________ of reasoning from clues. Unlike American detective
stories with greater emphasis on sensationalism and action, their English counterparts tend to place a (50)_________ on plot and style.
As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes series has become more popular the whole world (51)_________,
some readers might be (52)_________ for believing that Doyle was the father of detective fiction. He actually was
not. On the contrary, Doyle acknowledged a heavy literary (53)_________ to Edgar Allan Poe, and indeed, the
invention of the genre must be credited (54)_________ this doomed genius of nineteenth-century American literature.
Such was Poe’s influence that, even today, many famous writers of detective fiction still consider it a (55)_________
of honor to follow the basic conventions established in his first “tale of ratiocination”—“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841).
Part 2. Read the following passage and do the tasks that follow.
WHO WERE THE NEANDERTALS?
For more than 200,000 years, the Neandertals occupied Europe and western Asia, battling the bitter cold of
glacial maximums and the daily perils of prehistoric life. Today they no longer exist. Beyond these two facts, however, 3
researchers fiercely debate who these large-brained hominids were, how they lived and exactly what happened to them.
The steadfast effort to resolve these elusive issues stems from a larger dispute over how modern humans
evolved. Some researchers posit that our species arose around 200,000 years ago in Africa, spread from there and
subsequently replaced archaic hominids around the world, whereas others propose that these ancient populations
contributed to the early modern human gene pool. As the best known of these archaic groups, Neandertals are critical
to the origins controversy. Yet this is more than an academic argument over certain events of our primeval past, for
in probing Neandertal biology and behavior, researchers must wrestle with the very notion of what it means to be fully
human and determine what, if anything, makes us moderns unique. Indeed, spurred by recent discoveries,
paleoanthropologists and archaeologists are increasingly asking, “How much like us were they?”.
Comparisons of Neandertals, then still unknown, and modern humans first captured the attention of researchers
when a partial Neandertal skeleton turned up in Germany’s Neander Valley in 1856. Those remains—a heavily built
skull with the signature arched browridge and massive limb bones—were clearly different, and in 1864 Neandertals
were assigned to their own species, Homo neanderthalensis. But it was the French discovery of the famous “Old Man”
of La Chapelle-aux-Saints some 50 years later that led to the characterization of Neandertals as lumbering, stooped,
primitive protohumans lurking behind the evolutionary threshold of humanity, in stark contrast to upright, graceful Homo sapiens.
Decades later, reevaluation of the La Chapelle individual revealed that some of its features had been
misinterpreted. In fact, Neandertal posture and movement would have been the same as ours. Since then,
paleoanthropologists have struggled to determine whether the morphological features that characterize Neandertals
as a group—such as the robustness of their skeletons, their short limbs and barrel chests, prominent browridges and
low, sloping foreheads, protruding midfaces and chinless jaws—warrant designating them as a separate species.
Researchers agree that some of these characteristics represent environmental adaptations. The Neandertals’ stocky
build, for example, would have allowed them to retain heat more effectively in the extremely cold weather brought on
by glacial cycles. But other traits, such as the form of the Neandertal browridge, lack any clear functional significance
and seem to reflect the genetic drift typical of isolated populations.
For proponents of the replacement model of modern human origins, what are considered to be “distinctively
Neandertal” clearly resulted from following an evolutionary trajectory separate from that of moderns. But for years,
new evidence has challenged this interpretation. David W. Frayer, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Kansas,
points to one of the earliest-known modern Europeans, a fossil from a site in southwestern Germany called Vogelherd,
which combines the skull shape of moderns with Neandertals’ retromolar gap—the distinct space between the last
molar and the ascending part of the lower jaw. Another group of early moderns discovered at a site called Mladeč in
the Czech Republic exhibit uniquely Neandertal characteristics on their skulls. Also evident in later Neandertal fossils
from Vindija cave in northwestern Croatia—according to Fred H. Smith, a paleoanthropologist at Northern Illinois
University—are signs of more modern-shaped browridges and the slight presence of a chin on their mandibles. These
reflect “the assimilation of some early modern features,” he says.
Some scientists, however, have been skeptical about claims for interbreeding. This is because in July 1997,
Svante Pääbo, then at the University of Munich, and his colleagues announced in the journal Cell that they had
retrieved and analyzed mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from a Neandertal fossil. From the short stretch of mtDNA they
sequenced, the researchers determined that the difference between the Neandertal mtDNA and living moderns’
mtDNA was considerably greater than the differences found among living human populations—thus ruling out the
likelihood that we are descendants of the Neandertals. Although it seemed that the species question had been
answered, undercurrents of doubt have persisted.
New fossil evidence from western Europe has intensified interest in whether Neandertals and moderns mixed.
In January 1999, researchers announced the discovery in central Portugal’s Lapedo Valley of a largely complete
skeleton from a four-year-old child buried 24,500 years ago in the Gravettian style known from other early modern
Europeans. According to Erik Trinkaus of Washington University, Cidália Duarte of the Portuguese Institute of
Archaeology in Lisbon and their colleagues, the specimen, known as Lagar Velho 1, bears a combination of
Neandertal and modern human traits that could only have resulted from extensive interbreeding between the two
populations. But unlike other European specimens that are said to show a combination of features, the Portuguese
child dates to a time when Neandertals are no longer thought to have existed. For Neandertal features to have
persisted thousands of years after those people disappeared, Trinkaus and Duarte say, coexisting populations of
Neandertals and moderns must have mixed significantly. 4
Such interpretation has not gone unchallenged. The robust body proportions that Trinkaus and his colleagues
view as evidence for Neandertal ancestry, Christopher B. Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London says,
might instead reflect adaptation to Portugal’s then cold climate. But this interpretation is problematic, according to
Jean-Jacques Hublin from The French National Center for Scientific Research, who points out that although some
cold-adapted moderns exhibit such proportions, none are known from that period in Europe. Rather Hublin is troubled
that Lagar Velho 1 represents a child, noting that “we do not know anything about the variation in children of a given age in this range of time.”
For questions 56–61, decide whether the following statements are True (T), False (F), or Not Given (NG).
56. In the scientific community, there is little consensus on the evolutionary history of the Neandertals.
57. The Neandertals present a challenge to researchers who are trying to identify the distinguishing features of modern humans.
58. The discovery of the Neander Valley specimen was followed by the first major reclassification of the Neandertals.
59. After a reassessment of the “Old Man” specimen, paleoanthropologists have increasingly questioned the validity of classificatory techniques.
60. Supporters of the replacement theory believe that migrating human groups and the replaced hominids had a common ancestor.
61. The genetic material extracted and used in Pääbo’s study was representative of Neandertals’.
For questions 62–68, read the following summary and fill in each blank with NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS
taken from the passage.
New archaeological evidence continues to shed light on the relationship between modern humans and the
Neandertals, adding fuel to the ongoing origins debate.
Despite some researchers’ argument that the slow, (62) ______________________ got supplanted by our
species, there still linger (63) ______________________. For example, while fossil samples from Central Europe
show that some (64) ______________________ thought to belong only to the Neandertals are also present in modern
Europeans, the possibility of early modern humans’ (65) ______________________ harboring Neandertal ancestry
seems to contradict the published findings of Pääbo and his colleagues.
Furthermore, interpretations of the same piece of fossil evidence can differ widely, as in the case of the Lagar
Velho 1, whose combined traits Trinkaus and Duarte attribute to (66) ______________________. However, Stringer
suspects that the (67) ______________________ of this specimen were simply a response to hostile habitats, while
Hublin wonders if Lagar Velho 1 was a (68) ______________________ at all.
Part 3. In the passage below, seven paragraphs have been removed. For questions 69–75, read the passage
and choose from paragraphs A–H the one which fits each gap. There is ONE extra paragraph which you do
not need to use. Write your answers in the corresponding numbered boxes provided. A HOUSE PARTY ON CORFU
A British archaeologist revisits Corfu, an island off the coast of Albania
I was lucky enough to be first invited to Kanonas villa on Corfu 25 years ago. Arriving by speedboat on a balmy July
night, I followed the steep path up through the dark Corfiot olive grove to the discreet and magical house commanding the promontory. 69
The house was conceived by the Greek artist Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika, always known as Ghika (1906-94). His
house in Hydra had tragically been burned down. His wife Barbara and his stepson Lord Jacob Rothschild acquired
the property in Corfu where, with Ghika, they created the house that one can see today. 70
In 1948, Jacob’s stepfather made two small carvings of Odysseus and Nausicaa, and wrote to the Greek prime
minister, Georgios Ral is, proposing to enlarge them “to a height of three and a half metres” to be mounted overlooking
the Straits to remind travellers that the Ithacan captain found safety and succour at Mouse Island (part of fabled
Phaeacia), just south of Corfu’s airport, before setting out on the last leg of his odyssey to rejoin his wife and son. 71 5
The occasion was worthy of a film. Jacob and his grandchildren performed the honours, revealing the two sculptures
as we listened to a Corfiot operatic ensemble perform Monteverdi’s II Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria. Beyond, across the
Straits of Corfu, my eyes were drawn to the hinterland of Butrint. 72
I could pick out Çuka e Aitoit in the failing light, thought to be ancient Kestrine, at the east end of the Pavllas river that
used to reach to Butrint itself. Peering past Nausicaa, my eyes were drawn to the low cliffs of Cape Stillo, rugged in
low relief. Truth be told, this was a house party for all the senses: joyous, thanks to the mixture of music and sculptures
brought to life, and then the sweeping views of places resonant with history and myths from my digging days in Albania. 73
This wasn’t always the plan. When we first arrived at Butrint in 1994, projects were being shaped to build an airport
and a medley of resorts in this valley. In time, this concrete intrusion was forsaken. Instead, the Homeric setting for
the UNESCO World Heritage Site at Butrint has steadily gained in appreciation, leaving all memory of the tourist
development to a forgotten moment of madness. Now there are bold plans to take the Butrint project further. One idea
is to enlarge the park to embrace much of the Pavllas valley and Albania’s rugged, southern finger: Cape Stillo. 74
Not much has altered on this treeless massif of denuded hills since Durrell took his sailing boat in the 1930s across
the Straits. Cape Stillo is today the south-westernmost point of Albania, a place largely unknown to most Albanians
as a result of a decision taken a century ago. 75
If this happened, so the Italian delegation portentously informed Grey, Italy would bomb the Albanian capital and the
Greek minority capital. Grey sought a diplomatic compromise. Cape Stillo, along with Korça in south-eastern Albania,
would be ceded to Albania while, in their place, Greece would gain some Aegean islands. After six months of wrangling,
Grey got his way and Cape Stillo is one of the two places named in the making of the new Republic of Albania in August 1913.
Missing Paragraphs
A Jacob is the architect of the excavations at Butrint, immediately across the Straits of Corfu, and a lifelong polymath
with passions for archaeology, the arts, history, and people. To mark the 50th anniversary of Kanonas, in keeping
with Jacob’s infinite creativity, he decided to realise one of Ghika’s unfinished projects.
B After the Greek army conquered this area, defeating the Ottoman Empire in March 1913, it was assumed that all
southern Albania would be ceded to Greece at the Treaty of London. Earl Grey, the British Foreign Secretary and
chairman of the Great Powers, went so far as to propose this. The Italians reacted angrily. Under no circumstances
could Greece control both sides of the Straits of Corfu.
C “Ghika was unbelievably inward-looking,” Jacob recalls, “very thoughtful, very old-fashioned; he didn’t speak
much—his great interest was painting. I knew him well, yet he was a person you couldn’t know real y well because
he did not wear his heart on his sleeve. When we set up house here after the devastating fire, at first, as a proud
Greek he rather resented the fact that we had settled on his turf, but then he grew to love it and painted it many times.”
D From Kanonas, the land seems much as the English poet and painter Edward Lear found it when he sailed to
Butrint in 1857. The landscape is bare, dotted with occasional villages little more than specks. This is intentional:
here is a national park, created in January 2000 by the government, that provides a natural lung not just for
Albanians but also for the millions of tourists visiting Corfu.
E However, the plan came to nothing until Jacob put together a team to make it happen. This August, I was privileged
to return to Kanonas for a party to celebrate the unveiling of the monumental statues, made in a Thebes foundry.
Seventy years after their conception, Ghika’s two models have been transformed into mighty figures.
F The silence was precious save for the incessant drumming of cicadas. Everything about the place was
extraordinary: the mercurial view of the Epirote mountains far beyond; walls carpeted with paintings and sketches
which conveyed the spirit of a deeper past, even though the house itself was built in 1969. Here lingers the old
Corfu that the British novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell knew, enchantingly concealed from the rapacious
destruction for tourism of much of this ravishing coast. 6
G There lies another world. Victorian traveller the Reverend Tozer regarded the place as the limits of Asia. Certainly,
nowhere could be more different than over-built Corfu. The distant, mammoth-ribbed mountains are devoid of life.
Seen from our festivities, these might as well be the mountains of the moon. Miraculously frozen in time, this
landscape appeared blessed, shaped by the reddish benediction of sunset.
H A legend connecting this place and Corfu is recounted in Durrell’s lyrical memoir, Prospero’s Cell. A fisherman
told him about two lovers during the Ottoman occupation. He was an Albanian Muslim banished from Corfu, and
she was a Greek kept captive on the coast. Before he left, they agreed to signal each other by lighting fires on the
second Sunday of every month—he on the rocky tip of Cape Stillo, she at Govino on the island. For three years,
they maintained this messaging of love until the girl died and her lover was executed.
Part 4. For questions 76–85, read the passage and choose the best answer A, B, C or D.
1 Comics, composite texts combining words and images to convey meaning in a way different from that of
traditional narrative modes, are also called graphic narratives or graphic novels. Like films, comics rely on images
to elicit reader’s response and encourage a more immediate textual engagement. However, given its relatively
limited temporal space, the comic book must condense its characters’ development along commonly accepted
paradigms. In American culture, in which race and ethnicity have been perennial concerns, this means narrating
through stereotypes, a complex process as revealing in the insights it affords as it is problematic. By portraying
characters based on a set of physical, gestural, and occupational assumptions, American comics writers can not
only familiarize the reader with the plot and the action but also reveal, overtly or otherwise, certain recognized or
unconscious prejudices entrenched in the culture. Indeed, there is always the danger of caricature, which strips
ethnically different characters of any unique identity and dehumanizes them by means of reductive iconography—
the exaggerated depiction of Africans and Asians as having big noses, bug eyes, buck teeth, and other generally deformed features.
2 Recently, literary scholars have begun to explore how comics can have an almost counterintuitive ability to
dismantle those very assumptions that problematize ethnic representation. These scholars argue that comics can
uniquely do this by particularizing the general, thereby undermining any attempts at subjective erasure through
universalization, for the broader or more abstract a cartoon figure is depicted—that is, the more iconic its features
are—the closer the reader comes to identifying with that subject. As a result, non-representational depictions
encourage readers to empathize with a character and connect to other experiences and communities that might
otherwise have been unfamiliar. And as figures are laid out within panels on a page together with their physical
behaviors and speech, the changeability of the individual self shines through, underscoring the construction of the
ethno-racial subject and the fluidity of ethnic identity.
3 However, some critics have pointed out that a meaningful and clear definition of the genre is an important
pre-requisite to successful critical reflection on ethnic difference in American comics. These critics challenge the
adequacy and precision of a few terms commonly used to denote graphic texts. For instance, how is one to
categorize Miné Okubo’s acclaimed book, Citizen 13660? On the one hand, this work—while not considered by
most to be an example of comics because it lacks sequential imaging within a single page and dialogue balloons
or any variation of this verbal convention—nevertheless demonstrates heavy reliance on images to poignantly
narrate Okubo’s experiences in Japanese internment camp during World War II. On the other hand, to give a text
the descriptive tag “graphic novel” instead of “comics” is to designate it as a respectable medium of art but also,
by implication, to brush aside comics as frivolous, mainly preoccupied with costumed heroes, cute little kids, and talking animals.
4 While exclusively embracing “graphic novel” risks eliding much of what is interesting in comics history and
depriving readers of an appreciation of great comics that do not resemble novels, is opting for the opposite—
acquiescence to this nebulous terminology—any better? Like many nineteenth-century British and American
novels that were published in installments, “novelistic” graphic works were originally serialized as smaller sections
within individual comic book issues or an entire mini-series and thus do not seem at odds with our common
understanding of the novel. But is it appropriate to cal a comic book series stil under production a “graphic novel,”
especial y when the “novel” is not yet finished? And how many kinds of texts can legitimately be graphic novels?
In any large bookstore, there usually will be a whole section devoted to graphic novels, and on those shelves one
will find, unsurprisingly, works of graphic fiction lumped together with graphic memoirs, (auto)biographies,
journalistic comic books, illustrated fiction, and even essays on comics aesthetics.
5 Given all of these considerations, the term “graphic narrative” best captures the comics medium in most of its
permutations. If we define “narrative” as the representation of an event/action, or a series of events/actions, then 7
various forms of text certainly qualify if they possess a set of narrative characteristics that distinguish themselves
from non-narrative forms of graphic representation. Although this method of classification would be a matter of
degree and context, saying that a comic contains more or less narrativity would not be the same as making
aesthetic or cultural judgments of value, however inadvertent those judgments might be.
6 Issues of labels are also bound up with those of literary merit, for how texts are perceived plays a large role
in their acceptance in the classroom and legitimacy within various fields of scholarship. In the academia, despite
attempts at a more inclusive understanding of the genre, there remains an all-too-familiar tendency to devalue
generic or fantasy comics and to lionize “alternative” graphic narratives, which have sophisticated form and
cherished literary value. However, in privileging works by marginal writers who feel alienated from or set
themselves against the mainstream industry, we may be inadvertently marginalizing an entire community of writers
whose works resonate with multi-ethnic import. The ways in which superhero comics are created and consumed,
for example, can speak volumes about the ways the ethnic subject is framed. Discounting generic comics from
serious scholarly studies would be analogous to overlooking nineteenth-century sentimental women’s fiction just
because it was formulaic and widely read.
76. Which of the following most accurately expresses the main point of the passage?
A Persistent issues of racism and discrimination, both in the general American readership of graphic narratives
and in the scholarly communities that study them, complicate efforts to envision a more inclusive literary canon
that welcomes marginalized works of art.
B As both a creative art form and a cultural site for critical engagement, the contemporary graphic narrative
should adopt a set of characteristics that would enable it to address race relations in America.
C The strategies used by American graphic artists to contextualize ethnic subjects in their works raise serious
problems of representation that can be best addressed by reflecting on the nature of character iconography.
D Understanding the ability of graphic narratives to represent the American culture’s complexity requires a far
more nuanced conception and assessment of the genre than those that are conventionally used.
77. The conclusion drawn from the literary scholars’ argument in the second paragraph would be most
effectively strengthened if which one of the following were true?
A The degree to which an artistic strategy is rigorously applied correlates positively with the degree to which that
strategy successfully challenges received notions.
B Illustrations that either are or seem to be faithfully rendered throw into relief the difference between the subject of art and the viewer.
C No artistic medium other than comics is effective in documenting the formation of identity in historically oppressed social groups.
D Readers of comics who develop empathy for ethnic characters do so by imagining these as representatives
of the cultures to which these characters belong.
78. The passage contains information that most helps to answer which one of the following questions?
A Are favorable scholarly reviews of a graphic text a necessary condition for its appearance on a course syllabus?
B Is the use of photographic images in Italian comics, or fumetti, as a basis for storytelling sufficient to justify
their subsumption under “graphic narrative”?
C What are the mechanisms through which some distinguished graphic novelists distance their works from
prevailing trends in the industry?
D What shared structuring principles and conventional techniques exist between the prose novel and the comic novel?
79. In the fourth paragraph, the main purpose of the author is to
A challenge seemingly fixed distinctions between fiction and non-fiction
B examine the impacts of an alternative action on public perception of graphic texts
C illustrate the problems inherent in overgenerous application of a label
D continue taking issue with an argument introduced in the previous paragraph
80. In the context of paragraph 4, which one of the following best explains the classification of graphic texts in large bookstores?
A the need to come to terms with disparate texts that seem to have something visual in common
B the lack of shelf space reserved for the less popular items in the comics section
C the desire to impress customers with a vast array of reading options catering to almost every taste 8
D the attempt to confer a respectable status on all forms of graphic texts
81. Information from the passage most strongly supports which one of the following inferences?
A That texts have in common some notable attributes is hardly warrant for assuming the former belong to a
genre that has the latter as an essential part.
B Most graphic artists resort to a less than ideal mode of representation out of the need to accommodate their
comic-book characters in a limited medium.
C If it were not for ethno-racial issues prevalent in America, stereotyping would not necessarily become a
prominent feature in that nation’s comics.
D There are few published fantasy comics that can rival even the weakest alternative comics in terms of novelty of content and form.
82. In the fifth paragraph, the author of the passage does all of the following EXCEPT:
A make a carefully reasoned proposal
B justify the implications of a decision
C delimit the scope of a set of criteria
D consider hypothetical counterarguments
83. Which one of the following most accurately describes the developmental pattern of the first half of the passage?
A The first paragraph defines an art medium in relation to other conventional genres, the second paragraph
illustrates the possibility of that medium minimizing its own drawbacks, and the third paragraph examines two
instances in which the meaning of works in the medium can be complicated.
B The first paragraph locates an art medium in a narrower context in which several dilemmas are raised, the
second paragraph presents expert opinions on the use of that medium to resolve existing cultural issues, and
the third paragraph argues for a systematic revision of the art medium.
C The first paragraph explains an aesthetic decision that has implications for an art medium, the second
paragraph advances two ways in which that medium might address those implications, and the third paragraph
outlines problems involved in the demarcation of the medium.
D The first paragraph introduces the underlying principles and intrinsic problems of an art medium, the second
paragraph examines how effectively that medium might resolve issues of a broader scope, and the third
paragraph challenges critiques of classification within the art medium.
84. Based on the information in the passage, which one of the following, if true, would be LEAST likely to
facilitate acceptance of a graphic text by an academic community that has the “tendency” described in the last paragraph?
A The text appeals both to young readers among whom there remains a marked decline in reading interests and
to adult readers who prefer entertainment values
B The text provides a basis for challenging the validity of selection and exclusion in the current body of established literary works
C In cataloguing the text’s various visual icons, scholars surprisingly discovered an authorial reluctance to
address the fragmented nature of the ethnic body
D The text, on closer examination, reveals a network of subversive symbolism and ironic dialogues that eludes a casual observer
85. Which one of the following statements would most logically complete the last paragraph of the passage?
A Therefore, even works whose gender-specific ethos is prejudicially dismissed should be studied, for in them
can be found important counter-hegemonic ideas.
B It follows that comics should be treated not only as aesthetic works of narrative art but also as rich cultural
documents that can truly become vehicles of American ethnoracial expression.
C Thus, scholars of graphic narrative should expand their understanding of this varied medium to develop a
canon of comics itself, in which the most pedestrian expressions of mainstream art take center stage.
D Mindful of these facts, teachers of multi-ethnic writing should familiarize themselves with different facets of
ethnoracial narratives and encourage the teaching of comics in the classroom. 9
Part 5. The passage below consists of five sections marked A, B, C, D, and E. For questions 86–95, read the
passage and do the task that follows.
SONGS IN THE KEY OF LIFE
Danielle A. Jackson reviews Emily J. Lordi. Durham’s book The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s
A In August 1969, the Billboard “Hot Rhythm & Blues Singles” chart was rechristened “Best Sel ing Soul Singles.” A
new type of music had emerged, “the most meaningful development within the broad mass music market within
the last decade,” according to the magazine. The genre mystified much of the mainstream press. Publications
like Time announced soul music’s birth one year earlier as if it were a phenomenon worthy of both awe and
condescension. Its June 1968 issue featured Aretha Franklin, “a chunky, 5-foot 5-inch girl” who sang with “gritty
conviction,” as its cover star and called the music “a homely distillation of everybody’s daily portion of pain and
joy.” Her ability to keep a crowd on its feet was attributed to the personal losses she had endured: Franklin’s
mother left the family when she was six and died just before she turned ten; by fourteen, Franklin herself would
become a mother. According to this reasoning, soul music was not art so much as an unrefined expression of hardship.
B In The Meaning of Soul, Emily J. Lordi addresses these misapprehensions, which are often based on
everything but the music. She argues that a broader misremembering of the civil rights and Black Power
movements has skewed soul music’s history, which in reality was more heterogenous and imaginative than it has
been given credit for. In Lordi’s sophisticated and perceptive rendering, “soul logic” encompasses the term’s racial-
political meanings and also reflects a kind of virtuosic survivorship made manifest in the details of the music. And
while many critics have either placed soul in a vaguely political context that deemphasizes the musical choices
and inventiveness of well-trained artists such as Franklin or Nina Simone, or critiqued the music’s apparent
shortcomings—its lack of patience with unorthodox notions of Blackness, its heterosexism and reverence for
masculinity—Lordi insists that women and queer people were central to the creation and performance of soul
music from the beginning. If there is a unifying theme in her books, articles, and essays, it is an interest and
sincere belief in the breadth of Black expressive culture, exemplified by the left-of-center virtuosity of artists like
singer-songwriter Donny Hathaway or poets Nikki Giovanni and Lucille Clifton.
C In this book, Lordi uses a method of close listening “grounded in a moment-to-moment description of what is
happening” in the songs. This means that wails and moans and scats and the intricacies of stage performances
are texts that can be mined for meaning. When James Brown falls to his knees an astounding five times during a
performance of “Please, Please, Please,” he is enacting the collective Black resilience soul artists labored to
conjure. When Ann Peebles slips into a falsetto on the word “rain” during the skittery chorus of her 1973 hit “I
Can’t Stand the Rain,” Lordi explains that Peebles is expressing a “cool interiority.” Here and elsewhere, soul’s
connection to gospel is palpable—partly because its main practitioners, including Peebles, Brown, and Franklin,
were trained in the church, and the energy of devotion remained constant in the new music, even as the markers
of religion fell away. Soul groups also borrowed mightily from jazz: the musicians themselves, the instrumentation,
and a hunger for improvisation. And the architects of rhythm and blues, such as Little Richard and Esquerita, lent
their rhythmic sense, dynamism, and vocal style to the “new” music.
D With welcoming prose that belies its density, The Meaning of Soul focuses on soul singers’ covers of songs written
by white artists; ad-libs, improvisations, and mistakes; the uses of falsetto and the “false endings” that trickle
throughout the oeuvres of many Black artists. She is attentive to the significant contributions of the female
architects of the genre. Simone, who trained as a classical pianist and earned the moniker “High Priestess of Soul,”
is a key figure in Lordi’s retelling, as is Minnie Riperton, who first became well known as the lead singer of the
psychedelic funk outfit Rotary Connection. Their cover of Franklin’s “Respect” (which had been usurped from Otis
Redding, the writer of its lyrics) sounds fresh and avant-garde, less an anthem than a cooing negotiation between lovers.
E Following the work of legendary Black journalists Phyl Garland and Clayton Riley, Lordi gives a deft, concise
accounting of soul music’s political and social milieu. From the beginning, “soul was fundamentally linked,” she
writes, “to the kind of togetherness forged under siege.” Lordi tells this story of Black resilience by foregrounding
the ways the personal, the political, and the idiosyncratic were expressed through musical craft. She complicates 10
the notion of “soul-era politics” by emphasizing the collectivist spirit of mutual aid that animated the culture. As
she writes: “I do not claim that soul songs provided perfect models of togetherness, but I do think that the logic of
soul, as a force of group encouragement, offers a crucial alternative to our current state of personal and political
atomization. By seeing soul’s complex beauty as a site of alternative futures, I refute suggestions from all quarters
that what we have now—post-soul, the neoliberal hustle, the carceral state, electoral politics—is the best we could
possibly get. Soul-era visionaries worked for and imagined more.” Soul strengthened communal bonds, assuring
people that even their most chilling experiences of grief did not isolate them but rather connected them.
Which section mentions the following? Your answers:
86. musical techniques commonly found in a certain group of artists 86. _______
87. a determination against complacency 87. _______
88. an unpretentious presentation of certain subjects in soul music 88. _______
89. an assessment of soul music’s pioneers that goes against the grain 89. _______
90. the experimental quality of a song 90. _______
91. existing perceptions of soul music being less than accurate 91. _______
92. the idea that certain features of soul music are derivative 92. _______
93. an alternative definition that results from examining particular facts 93. _______
94. the use of different signifiers in songs to give form to abstract ideas 94. _______
95. highlighting different expressions of solidarity in music 95. _______
IV. WRITING (60 points)
Part 1. Read the following extract and use your own words to summarize it. Your summary should be between 100 and 120 words.
Although the most famous scientific discoveries seem to open whole new windows of the mind, a typical scientific
paper has never pretended to be more than another little piece in a larger jigsaw—not a final statement of indisputable
truths but merely a tiny tentative step forward, through the jungles of ignorance. This technique of soliciting many
modest contributions to the vast store of human knowledge has been the secret of Western science since the
seventeenth century, for it achieves a corporate, collective power that is far greater than any one individual can exert.
Because normal science is a highly cooperative activity, scientific papers are largely unoriginal—the corporate
product of a vast social institution, rather than a series of individual forays into the unknown. The evidence for this is
plain to see, in the long list of citations that must always be published with every new contribution. These citations not
only vouch for the authority and relevance of the statements that they are called up on to support; they also embed
the whole work in a context of previous achievements and current aspirations. At the same time, a scientific paper is
a cunningly contrived piece of rhetoric, not a candid autobiography. It has only one purpose: to persuade the reader
of the veracity of the observer, his disinterestedness, his logical infallibility, and the complete necessity of his
conclusions. To reach this end, the style of so much scientific writing may seem outrageous, but this is because
scientists are obsessed with the desire to make their work conform to the conventions of a particular target audience.
They favor the passive voice, the impersonal gender, and the latinized circumlocution because these would seem to
permit, in the circumstances, a climate of opinion within which, as it were, one can express relatively positive
assertions in a tentative tone to which one would not be utterly committed if it should happen that a research
experiment had not been rigorously conducted. This sort of shyness is not just a trick for escaping when one turns out
to be wrong; it is a device of “inverted rhetoric” by which an apparently modest and disinterested tone enhances the
acceptability of one’s utterances. 11 Part 2.
The chart below gives information about the median annual earnings, in US dollars, for different
bachelor’s degrees by years of experience, in the US in 2014.
Summarize the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant. Write at least 150 words.
Part 3. Think carefully about the ideas presented in the given quotation. Then, follow the writing instructions
in the box below the quotation. Quotation
“Two centuries ago, our forebears would have known the precise history and origin of nearly every one of the limited
number of things they ate and owned, as well as of the people and tools involved in their production. They were
acquainted with the pig, the carpenter, the weaver, the loom and the dairymaid. The range of items available for
purchase may have grown exponentially since then, but our understanding of their genesis has diminished
almost to the point of obscurity. We are now as imaginatively disconnected from the manufacture and
distribution of our goods as we are practically in reach of them, a process of alienation which has stripped
us of myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt.”
—Alain de Botton, British philosopher and author (1969–present) WRITING INSTRUCTIONS
Write a well-developed essay in which you answer all of the following questions:
• Do people in our country know a lot or very little about the products they consume daily? Why?
• What “myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt” might a better understanding of
those products’ origins bring?
Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your knowledge, experience, or observations. Write at least 350 words. 12 V. Speaking Question.
Some people think that, nowadays, museums should find ways to appeal to different groups of visitors. Others
disagree, claiming that if museums try too hard to please everyone, these institutions will soon lose sight of their
real mission: to educate people about the past. Discuss both views and give your opinion.
You have 5 minutes to prepare for your talk. Good luck! ---The End--- 13