Question: Read the following article and select the best answer. Article: According to US research, it can take up to ten years to become a near-native English speaker. Asian and Spanish students took between five and ten years to reach native speaker performance in English-only schools. Fluency obviously doesn't happen overnight. But time can definitely make you a better speaker. After testing his own memory, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered that humans forget most of what they learn in the first 20 minutes. So cramming right before a speaking exam is not likely to be as effective as practicing regularly over time. The more you practice, the more familiar new words will become. In the classroom, studies have also shown that repeating oral tasks improves a speaker's performance. One of the best repetition exercises is the 4/3/2 technique. Speakers give the same talk to three different listeners with a progressive decrease in delivery time, starting at four minutes, then three, and finally two minutes. This exercise has been proven to help learners speak faster. It can also result in less hesitation and more grammatical accuracy. While time dose make a difference when it comes to speaking perfect English, it would not hurt to brush up on your other language skills. Studies have also shown that reading can increase your speaking vocabulary. After one month of an extensive reading program, a 27-year-old student of French became more familiar with 65 percent of the new words. Aside from choosing the right learning methods, having certain personality traits may also help. US Stephen Krashen believes those with high motivation, self-confidence and a low level of anxiety are better equipped for speaking success. Krashen says students who don't have these qualities are more likely to have a "mental block". "Even if they understand the message, the input will not reach the part of the brain responsible for language acquisition," he writes in his book Principles and Practice in second Language Acquisition. Question: According to the passage, if you want to be a near-native speaker, you need _ . - long-term speaking practice and much reading - speaking practice for ten years only - long-term speaking practice, much reading and certain qualities - cramming new words every day
Answer: long-term speaking practice, much reading and certain qualities

Question: Read the following article and select the best answer. Article: On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln went to Gettysburg to speak at the National Soldiers Cemetery . The Civil War was still going on. There was much criticism of President Lincoln at the time. He had been invited to speak at Gettysburg only out of politeness. The other speaker was to be Edward Everett, a famous statesman and speaker of the day. Everett was a handsome man and very popular everywhere. It is said that Lincoln prepared his speech on the train while going to Gettysburg. Later that night, alone in his hotel room and tired out, he again worked briefly on the speech. The next day Everett spoke first. His speech lasted an hour and 57 minutes and it was a perfect example of the day. Then Lincoln rose. The crowd of 15,000 people at first paid little attention to him. He spoke for only nine minutes. At the end there was little applause . Lincoln turned to a friend and said, "I have failed again." Some newspapers at first criticized the speech. But little by little, as people read the speech, they began to like its simplicity and its deep meaning. It was a speech which only Abraham Lincoln could have made. Now everyone thinks of it as one of the greatest speeches ever given in American history. Question: Lincoln's speech was _ . - an immediate success - not accepted at all - a total failure - not well-received at first
Answer: not well-received at first

Question: Read the following article and select the best answer. Article: Every profession or trade, every art, and every science has its technical vocabulary, the function of which is partly to refer to things or processes which have no names in ordinary English, and partly to secure greater exactness in expression. Such special dialects, or jargon, are necessary in technical discussion of any kind. Being universally understood by the devotees of the particular science or art, they have the precision of a mathematical formula . Besides, they save time, for it is much more economical to name a process than to describe it. Thousands of these technical terms are very properly included in every large dictionary, yet, as a whole, _ Different professions, however, differ widely in the character of their special vocabularies. In trades and handicrafts and other professions, such as farming and fishing, that have occupied great numbers of men from remote times, the technical vocabulary is very old. It consists largely of native words, or of borrowed words that have worked themselves into the very fiber of our language, hence, though highly technical in many particulars, these vocabularies are more familiar in sound, and more generally understood than most other technicalities. The special dialects of law, medicine, and philosophy have also become pretty familiar to cultivated person, and have contributed much to the popular vocabulary. Yet, every profession still possesses a large body of technical terms that remain essentially foreign, even to educated speech. And the proportion has been much increased in the last fifty years, particularly in the various departments of natural and political sciences and in the mechanic arts. So new terms are coined with the greatest freedom, and abandoned with indifference when they have served their turn. Most of the new coinages are restricted to special discussions and seldom get into general literature or conversation. Yet no profession is nowadays, as all profession once were, a closed guild . The lawyer, the physician, the man of science, and... Question: The author mentions Roentgen rays and wireless telegraphy as examples of _ . - rapid occurrence of jargon - quick talk of an experiment - precision of jargon in meaning - fast expansion of technical words
Answer:
fast expansion of technical words