Bài tập trắc nghiệm 15 phút Đoạn văn đọc hiểu - Tiếng Anh 12 - Đề số 6

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 One of the most interesting authors of the twentieth century, J.R.R Tolkien, achieved fame through his highly inventive trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. Born in 1892, Tolkien received his education from Oxford and then served in World War I. After the war, he became a professor of Anglo - Saxon and English language and literature at Oxford University.

 Although published in 1965, the three books that comprise the Lord of the Rings were written in intervals from 1936 to 1949. This was mainly due to Tolkien's responsibilities as a professor and the outbreak of World War II. By the late 1960s, this fascinating trilogy had become a sociological phenomenon as young people intently studied the mythology and legends created by Tolkien.

 The trilogy is remarkable not only for its highly developed account of historical fiction but also its success as a modern heroic epic. The main plot describes the struggle between good and evil kingdom as they try to acquire a magic ring that has the power to rule the world. The novels, which are set in a time called Middle Earth, describe a detailed fantasy world. Established before humans populated the Earth, Middle Earth was inhabited by good and evil creatures such as hobbits, elves, monsters, wizards, and some humans. The characters and the setting of Middle Earth were modeled after mythological stories from Greece and Northern Europe.

 Although readers have scrutinized the texts for inner meaning and have tried to connect the trilogy with Tolkien's real life experiences in England during World War II, he denied the connection. He claims that the story began in his years as an undergraduate student and grew out of his desire to create mythology and legends about elves and their language.

 Tolkien was a masterful fantasy novelist who used his extensive knowledge of folklore to create a body of work that is still read and enjoyed throughout the world today.  

Question: What is the setting of Tolkien's trilogy?  

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You can usually tell when your friends are happy or angry by the looks on their faces or by their actions. This is useful because reading their emotional expressions helps you to know how to respond to important situations and to convey our intentions to others. But does raising the eyebrows and rounding the mouth say the same thing in Minneapolis as it does in Madagascar ? Much research on emotional expressions has centered on such questions. According to Paul Ekman, the leading researcher in this area, people speak and understand substantially the same “facial language”. Studies by Ekman’s group have demonstrated that humans share a set of universal emotional expressions that testify to the common biological heritage of the human species. Smiles, for example, signal happiness and frowns indicate sadness on the faces of people in such far-flung places as Argentina, Japan, Spain, Hungary, Poland, Sumatra, the United States, Vietnam, the jungles of New Guinea, and the Eskimo villages north of Artic Circle. Ekman and his colleagues claim that people everywhere can recognize at least seven basic emotions : sadness, fear, anger, disgust, contempt, happiness, and surprise. There are, however, huge differences across cultures in both the context and intensity of emotional displays – the so-called display responses – expecially negative ones – while many American children are encouraged to express their feelings more openly. Regardless of culture, however, emotions usually show themselves, to some degree, in people’s behavior. From their first days in life, babies produce facial expressions that communicate their feelings. The ability to read facial expressions develops early, too. Very young children pay close attention to facial expressions, and by age five, they nearly equal adults in their skill at reading emotions on people’s faces. This evidence all points to a biological underpinning for our abilities to express and interpret a basic set of human emotions. Moreover, as Chales Dawin pointed out over a century ago, some emotional expressions seem to appear across species boundaries. Cross-cultural psychologists tell us that certain emotional responses carry different meanings in diferrent cultures. For example, what emotion do you suppose might be conveyed while sticking out your tounge ? For American, this might indicate disgust, while in China it can signify surprise. Likewise, a grin on an American face may indicate joy, while on a Japanese face it may just as easily mean embarrassment. Clearly, culture influences emotional expressions.  

Question: The phrase “this evidence” in paragraph 3 refers to __________         

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                                                                  COLORS AND EMOTIONS

Colors are one of the most exciting experiences in life. I love them, and they are just as important to me as emotions are. Have you ever wondered how the two are so intimately related? Color directly affects your emotions. Color both reflects the current state of your emotions, and is something that you can use to improve or change your emotions. The color that you choose to wear either reflects your current state of being, or reflects the color or emotion that you need. The colors that you wear affect you much more than they affect the people around you. Of course they also affect anyone who comes in contact with you, but you are the one saturated with the color all day! I even choose items around me based on their color. In the morning, I choose my clothes based on the color or emotion I need for the day. So you can consciously use color to control the emotions that you are exposed to, which can help you to feel better. Color, sound and emotions are all vibrations. Emotions are literally energy in motion; they are meant to move and flow. This is the reason that real feelings are the fastest way to get your energy in motion. Also, flowing energy is exactly what creates healthy cells in your body. So, the fastest way to be healthy is to be open to your real feelings. Alternately, the fastest way to create disease is to inhibit your emotions.

Question: The term “intimately” in paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to________.         

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Quite different from storm surges are the giant sea waves called tsunamis, which derive their name from the Japanese expression for “high water in a harbor”. These waves are also referred to by the general public as tidal waves, although they have relatively little to do with tides. Scientists often referred to them as seismic sea waves, far more appropriate in that they do result from undersea seismic activity. Tsunamis are caused when the sea bottom suddenly moves, during an underwater earthquake or volcano for example, and the water above the moving earth is suddenly displaced. This sudden shift of water sets off a series of waves. These waves can travel great distances at speeds close to 700 kilometers per hour. In the open ocean, tsunamis have little noticeable amplitude, often no more than one or two meters. It is when they hit the shallow waters near the coast that they increase in height, possibly up to 40 meters. Tsunamis often occur in the Pacific because the Pacific is an area of heavy seismic activity. Two areas of the Pacific well accustomed to the threat of tsunamis are Japan and Hawaii. Because the seismic activity that causes tsunamis in Japan often occurs on the ocean bottom quite close to the islands, the tsunamis that hit Japan often come with little warning and can, therefore, prove disastrous. Most of the tsunamis that hit the Hawaiian Islands, however, originate thousands of miles away near the coast of Alaska, so these tsunamis have a much greater distance to travel and the inhabitants of Hawaii generally have time for warning of their imminent arrival. Tsunamis are certainly not limited to Japan and Hawaii. In 1755, Europe experienced a calamitous tsunami, when movement along the fault lines near the Azores caused a massive tsunami to sweep onto the Portuguese coast and flood the heavily populated area around Lisbon. The greatest tsunami on record occurred on the other side of the world in 1883 when the Krakatoa volcano underwent a massive explosion, sending waves more than 30 meters high onto nearby Indonesian islands; the tsunami from this volcano actually traveled around the world and was witnessed as far away as the English Channel.

Question 12: From the expression “on record” in line 19, it can be inferred that the tsunami that accompanied the Krakatoa volcano ___________ .         

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The New York Times is a daily newspaper published in New York City. For a long time, it has been a newspaper of record in the United State and one of the world’s great newspapers. Its strength is in its editorial excellence; it has never been the largest newspaper in terms of circulation. The Times was established in 1851 as a penny paper whose editors wanted to report the news in a restrained and objective fashion. It enjoyed early success as its editors set a pattern for the future by appealing to a cultured, intellectual readership instead of a mass audience. However, in the late nineteenth century, it came into competition with more popular, colorful, if not lurid, newspapers in New York City. Their publishers ran sensational stories, not because they were true, but because they sold newspapers. Despite price increases, the time was losing £1,000 a week when Adolph Simon Ochs bought it in 1896. Ochs built the Times into an internationally respected daily. He hired Carr Van Anda as editor. Van Anda placed greater stress than ever on full reporting of the news of the day, and his reporters maintained and emphasized existing good coverage of international news. The management of the paper decided to eliminate fiction from the paper, added a Sunday magazine section, and reduced the paper’s price back to a penny. In April 1912, the paper took many risks to report every aspect of the sinking of the Titanic. This greatly enhanced its prestige, and in its coverage of two world wars, the Times continued to enhance its reputation for excellence in world news. In 1971, the Times was given a copy of the so-called “Pentagon Papers” a secret government study of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war. When it published the report, it became involved in several lawsuits. The U.S. Supreme Court found that the publication was protected by the freedom-of-the-press clause in the First Amendment of the U.S Constitution. Later in the 1970s, the paper, under Adolph Ochs’s grandson, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, introduced sweeping changes in the organization of the newspaper and its staff and brought out a national edition transmitted by satellite to regional printing plants.

Question: According to the passage, the Times has a national edition that is__________             

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This rapid transcontinental settlement and these new urban industrial circumstances of the last half of the 19th century were accompanied by the development of national literature of great abundance and variety. New themes, new forms, new subjects, new regions, new authors, new audiences all emerged in the literature of this half century.

As a result, at the onset of World War I, the spirit and substance of American literature had evolved remarkably, just as its center of production had shifted from Boston to New York in the late 1880s and the sources of its energy to Chicago and the Midwest. No longer was it produced, at least in its popular forms, in the main by solemn, typically moralistic men from New England and the Old South; no longer were polite, well-dressed, grammatically correct, middle-class young people the only central characters in its narratives; no longer were these narratives to be set in exotic places and remote times; no longer, indeed, were fiction, poetry, drama, and formal history the chief acceptable forms of literary expression; no longer, finally, was literature read primarily by young, middle class women.

In sum, American literature in these years fulfilled in considerable measure the condition Walt Whitman called for in 1867 in describing Leaves of Grass: it treats, he said of his own major work, each state and region as peers "and expands from them, and includes the world ... connecting an American citizen with the citizens of all nations." At the same time, these years saw the emergence of what has been designated "the literature of argument," powerful works in sociology, philosophy, psychology, many of them impelled by the spirit of exposure and reform. Just as America learned to play a role in this half century as an autonomous international political, economic, and military power, so did its literature establish itself as a producer of major works.

Question: It can be inferred from the passage that Walt Whitman________.               

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Sony Pictures released a remarkable and intriguing film entitled The Da Vinci Code, based on the novel of the same name by Dan Brown. In the film, religious leaders and professors are in a race to discover the secrets of an organization called the Priory of Sion. The biggest secret kept by this organization is supposedly that Jesus Christ and a woman whose name is recorded in the Bible as Mary Magdalene had a child, and that their family 55 line continues to this day. In a TV interview, Dan Brown stated that, in his book, "all of the art, architecture, secret rituals, secret societies, all of that is historical fact." However, while the Priory of Sion did exist, it's nothing like the one which is so central to The Da Vinci Code. The Priory of Sion was started in France in 1956 by a skillful liar named Pierre Plantard. Priory means religious house, and Sion was a hill in the town of Annemasse, where the Priory was started by Plantard and four of 60 his friends. At first, their group fought for housing rights for local people, and their offices were at Plantard's apartment. The organization promised to benefit the weak and the oppressed, and to do good in general. However, there was a darker side to the Plantard's Priory. Plantard actually hoped to use the Priory of Sion to claim to be a descendant of French kings. Between the years 1961 and 1984, Plantard created the enigma of a much more powerful Priory than his insignificant organization. First, in order to give the impression that the Priory began in 1099, Plantard and his friend Philippe de Cherisey created documents, called the Secret Dossiers of Henri Lobineau, and illegally put them into the National Library of France. Next, Plantard got author Gerard de Sede to write a book in 1967 using the false documents; the book became very popular in France. This phenomenon is similar to the popularity of The Da Vinci Code, where a book based on false information or speculation becomes popular. 70 Matters were complicated when in 1969, an English actor and science-fiction writer named Henry Lincoln read Gerard de Sede's book. Lincoln did not know of Plantard and his schemes, and may have been a victim of the hoax. He seemed to believe what he read, and jumped to even more wild conclusions, which he published in his 1982 book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. He and his co-authors declared as fact that the Priory started in 1099; that its leaders included Leonardo Da Vinci, Isaac Newton, and Victor Hugo; that the Priory protects the descendants of Jesus 75 Christ and Mary Magdalene; and that these descendants ruled France from A.D. 447 to 751. All this was based on reading a novel based on the false facts from documents which were a hoax. Most modern historians do not consider Lincoln's book to be a serious work of history. How can we be so sure that Plantard created this hoax? Well, the best witness to a crime is the criminal himself. Over 100 hundred letters between Plantard, de Cherisey, and de Sede, discovered by researcher Jean-Luc 80 Chaumeil, show clearly that they were trying to pull an elaborate hoax. In fact, in the 1990s, Plantard got in trouble with the law, and his house was searched. Within it were found many false documents, most harmless, some of which said he was the true king of France. As a final embarrassment, Plantard had to swear in a court of law that the enigma of the Priory of Sion was the work of his imagination.

Question: Why did Plantard put documents in the National Library of France?         

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Psychologists who work on motivation research a wide range of human traits and physiological characteristics that include the effects of hunger, reward, and punishment, as well as desires for power, tangible achievement, social acceptance, belongingness, self-esteem, and self-actualization. A plethora of hypotheses developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have the goal of identifying causes of an organism’s behavior that can be both conscious and unconscious. The hierarchical organization of human needs is a theoretical model, originally established by an American psychologist, Abraham Maslow, in 1954. The needs located at the bottom of the pyramid are the essentials of physiological survival that encompass oxygen, water, nutrition, rest and avoidance of pain. Maslow’s theory, grounded in research, also stipulated that these are variable and, at least to some extent, may explain, for example, food gratification. The second tier is rooted in the human need for safety, stability and protection.

In the human life cycle, the needs for belonging are manifested in the desires to marry, have a family, belong in a community or among similarly minded people. In part, the need to belong can also show up in a search for particular types of occupations or careers. The next level of the hierarchy in effect deals with two substrata, where the first presumes the need for status, prestige, recognition, appreciation, and dominance, and the higher division includes a conglomeration of emotionally centered traits that pivot on competence, confidence, mastery, achievement, independence, and freedom.

The top tier is different from all others, and Maslow referred to it as growth motivation and self-actualization. At the highest level, individuals seek to realize and put to use their creativity, talent, leadership, curiosity and understanding. At this level people can reach their full potentials and accurately perceive and accept reality, seek privacy and depth in personal relationships, resist enculturation, and develop social interests, compassion, and humanity. In many cases, self-actualizers do not lead ordinary lives, choose growth over safety, and cultivate peak experiences that leave their mark and change one for the better.

Question 36: According to the passage, what does psychology of motivation attempt to uncover?         

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The Nobel prizes, awarded annually for distinguished work in chemistry, physic, physiology or medicine, literature, and international peace, were made available by a fund bequeathed for that purpose by Swedish philanthropist, Alfred Bernard Nobel. The prizes, awarded since 1901, are administered by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm. In 1969, a prize for economics endowed by the Central Bank of Sweden was added. Candidates for the prizes must be nominated in writing by a qualified authority in the field of competition. Candidates are judged by Swedish and Norwegian academies and institutes on the basis of their contribution to mankind. The awards are usually presented in Stockholm ion December 10, with the King of Sweden officiating, an appropriate tribute to Alfred Nobel on the anniversary of his death. Each prize includes a gold medal, a diploma, and a cash award of about one million dollars.

Question: What does this passage mainly discussed?             

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The elements other than hydrogen and helium exist in such small quantities that it is accurate to say that the universe is somewhat more than 25 percent helium by weight and somewhat less than 75 percent hydrogen. Astronomers have measured the abundance of helium throughout our galaxy and in other galaxies as well. Helium has been found in old stars, in relatively young ones, in interstellar gas, and in the distant objects known as quasars. Helium nuclei have also been found to be constituents of cosmic rays that fall on the earth (cosmic rays are not really a form of radiation; they consist of rapidly moving particles of numerous different kinds). It doesn’t seem to make very much difference where the helium is found. Its relative abundance never seems to vary much. In some places, there may be slightly more of it; in others, slightly less, but the ratio of helium to hydrogen nuclei always remains about the same. Helium is created in stars. In fact, nuclear reactions that convert hydrogen to helium are responsible for most of the energy that stars produce. However, the amount of helium that could have been produced in this manner can be calculated, and it turns out to be no more than a few percent. The universe has not existed long enough for this figure to be significant greater. Consequently, if the universe is somewhat more than 25 percent helium now, then it must have been about 25 percent helium at a time near the beginning. However, when the universe was less than one minute old, no helium could have existed. Calculations indicate that before this time temperature were too high and particles of matter were moving around much too rapidly. It was only after the one-minute point that helium could exist. By this time, the universe had cooled so sufficiently that neutrons and protons could stick together. But the nuclear reactions that led to the formations of helium went on for only relatively short time. By the time the universe was a few minutes old, helium production had effectively ceased.

Question: The word "they" refers to _____