Read the article and select the best answer. Article: Making the announcement, Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, called Alice Munro a "master of the contemporary short story". "She has taken an art form, the short story, which has tended to live a little bit in the shadow of the novel, and she has cultivated it almost to perfection," he said. The 82-year-old, whose books include Dear Life and dance of the Happy Shades, is only the 13thwoman to win the Nobel Prize for literature since its start in 1901. "I knew I was in the running, yes, but I never thought I would win," Munro told Canadian media. Alice Munro: "I would really hope that this would make people see the short story as an important art form." Munro, who began writing in her teenage years, published her first story, The Dimensions of a Shadow, in 1950. Dance of the Happy Shades, published in 1968, was Munro's first collection, and it went on to win Canada's highest literary prize, the Governor General's Award. In 2009, she won the Man Booker International Prize for her entire body of work -- but she downplayed her achievements. "I think maybe I was successful in doing this because I didn't have any other talents," she once said in an interview. BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz said Munro had been "at the very top of her game since she started". "Very few writers are her equal," he said, adding "She gets to the heart of what it is to be human". The award "probably won't make a commercial difference" to the author, he added, but it "makes a huge difference to how her work will be viewed in historical terms". "If she hadn't won it before she died, I think it would have been a terrible, terrible omission ." Often compared to Anton Chekhov, she is known for writing about the human spirit and a regular theme of her work is the dilemma faced by young girls growing up and coming to terms with living in a small town. Several of her stories have also been adapted for the screen, including The Bear Came over the Mountain. Question: Which words can best describe Alice Munro? Options: A: Honest and responsible. B: Cautious and friendly. C: Caring and determined. D: Talented and modest.
D

Read the article and select the best answer. Article: How would you like to sleep with one half your brain asleep and the other half awake? Dolphins sleep this way. Recently, scientists at Indiana State University have discovered that ducks sleep this way too. They found that ducks sleep half awake so they can rest and watch for danger at the same time. After putting their ducks in a row and videotaping them, some researchers found ducks on the end of each row spent more time asleep with one eye open, apparently looking for _ "The more the ducks felt threatened, the more they slept with one eye open," said lead author Niels C. Rattenborg, a graduate student at Indiana State University, Terre Haute. "The unique aspect is not that they do it, but that they control it. When they sleep at the edge of a group, they tend to realize greater danger, so they spend more time sleeping with one half of their brain." Ducks with one eye open were still awake enough to detect predators, said the authors of the study, which appears today in the journal Nature. The researchers studied four groups of four ducks held in plastic boxes, which were arranged in a row. Ducks on the end were found to sleep with one eye open 31.8 per cent of the time, compared to 12.4 percent of the time for ducks in the central position. Also, ducks in the central position did not open one eye more than the others, while ducks on each end kept the eye facing away from the group open 86.2 per cent of the time. Brain wave readings of the ducks showed that the half of the brain receiving signals from the closed eye indicated that half of the brain was sleeping. Signals from the half of the brain receiving signals from the open eye showed a state between fully awake and asleep. Question: The under lined word "predator" is most likely to mean _ . Options: A: an animal that is likely to be friends with ducks B: a human being who looks after and feeds ducks C: a scientist who does research work on animals D: an animal that hunts, kills and eats other animals
D

Read the article and select the best answer. Article: London will stage its biggest political funeral in almost half a century on Wednesday when Britain's governing elite join the Queen and global leaders to bid farewell to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, better known as the " Iron Lady". In an event comparable to that of Winston Churchill's funeral in 1965, Thatcher's coffin will be carried on a horse-drawn gun carriage through streets lined with admirers from parliament to the city's most famous cathedral. The bells of London's symbolic Big Ben clock tower will fall silent for the first time since Churchill's funeral and more than 700 men and women from Britain's armed forces will honor a woman who led them to victory in the 1982 Falklands War as foreign politicians from around 170 nations look on. Surveys have shown that many are unhappy that the estimated l0-million($15 million)pound bill for the funeral is being picked up by the taxpayer, while some left-wing lawmakers say the luxurious funeral is too expensive. But her admirers, of whom there are many in her party and in southern England, argue that her historical profile deserves such a funeral. She was the country's first and only woman premier, was Britain's longest-serving prime minister of the 20th century, and won three general elections. More than 2,300 mourners will attend including 11 serving prime ministers from around the world, the British government's entire cabinet, two heads of state and 17 foreign ministers. But there will be notable absences. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is too ill to attend and Nancy Reagan, the widow of Thatcher's great U*S. ally Ronald Reagan, is also unable to come. Thatcher struck up a close relationship with Reagan during the Cold War, backed the first President George Bush during the 1991 Gulf War, and was among the first to discover that Gorbachev was a man she could "do business with. " Covered in the red, white and blue British flag, Thatcher's coffin lay overnight in a 13th-century church in Britain's parliament, a forum she dominated for years. Question: Which of the following might serve as the best title of the passage? Options: A: The legend of Thatcher, the "Iron Lady". B: Why Big Ben falls silent for the first time? C: Who will pay for such a luxurious funeral? D: London will witness its biggest political funeral.
D