Ques: Read the article and select the best answer. Article: I'm Evan Ducker. I'm just like every other 15-year-old boy, except I was born with a red birthmark . Some birthmarks are signs of serious medical conditions. I'm very fortunate--mine isn't. I pretty much live a regular life, except for people asking me about it all the time, which can get annoying sometimes. When I was about 4 years old, I asked my mom why there weren't any characters with birthmarks in the books she would read to me. When we went to the library, we realized there weren't any available for little kids. Worse than that, the books available to older kids and adults described characters with birthmarks as unattractive. So I decided to write my own. I based the story on all the real things that happened in my life. But instead of people, the characters in the book are real animals from the Galapagos Islands, including red-footed booby birds . I picked a booby bird as the main character because the birds have red feet due to a vascular condition, similar to a human birthmark! It was really tough to get my book published. It took a long time because a lot of publishers refused to publish it. They would say there wasn't a big enough market for a book about birthmarks. But my mom never gave up trying to help make my dream come true. And in 2005, she finally took her own money and self-published "Buddy Booby's Birthmark". After it was published, I got letters from readers all over the world. They all shared their stories and thanked me for sharing mine. Teachers wrote to tell me that my book changed the way classmates treated each other and that my book was helping kids to accept and appreciate their differences. Then, as more teachers started reading my book, I created a free global reading event, the "International Buddy Booby's Birthmark Read--Along for Tolerance and Awareness." Question: The author's book "Buddy Booby's Birthmark" _ . Options: A: was a best-seller in 2005 B: was the first book about birthmarks C: made a difference to its readers D: helped kids fall in love with reading
Ans: C

Ques: 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: According to the text, Alice Munro _ . Options: A: is very good at writing short stories B: had her first story published in 1968 C: is the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for literature D: was confident of winning the Nobel Prize for literature
Ans: A

Ques: Read the article and select the best answer. Article: On April 24th, another natural disaster-the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, happened. Millions of dollars have been used to help stop the spill and to clean up the animals, beaches, and land spoiled by the oil. Unfortunately, when many of these chemicals are used, more damage is caused to the environment, especially to lives in the sea. But governments seem to accept the _ of transporting mil-lions of tons of oil by ship every day so that we can fill up our cars and drive around and cause even more environmental damage. Interestingly, the biggest companies in the world produce cars, and the next biggest supply the gasoline to make them run. Of all of today's environmental disasters, an oil spill may actually be one of the least serious. Although oil is poisonous, it is a natural material. In the end, it breaks down naturally. In 1967 the tanker Torrey Canyon sank off the Scilly Isles near the coast of England and spilled 120,000 tons of oil into the ocean. If you go there today, you will find it hard to see any sign that it ever happened. However, we should be thinking more about reducing our dependency on oil. Governments should be encouraging research into new technologies, such as cars run by solar power, electricity, hydro-gen, and so on. Much of this research, in the past, was stopped by the oil, gas, and coal. If the world's millions of cars were 10% more efficient ,we would need many fewer tankers crossing the oceans each year. If this happened, the risks of oil spills would be reduced, and the air we breathe would be cleaner and fresher, too. Question: What is the passage mainly talking about? Options: A: Oil spills pollution. B: What oil pollution is. C: Oil tanker accidents. D: How to reduce oil pollution.
Ans:
A