Read the article and select the best answer. Article: A wood fire can be handy when you ' re camping. You can roast marshmallows or stay warm, for example. Forest fires that rage out of control, however, are a big problem. Wildfires cause hundreds of millions of dollars in damage every year. And the amount of destruction has grown over the last 2 decades,especially in the western United States. To understand better why the northern Rocky Mountains region has been hit especially hard by wildfires, scientists from the University of Arizona in Tucson looked at weather, snow, and fire records from 1970 to 2003. Their study showed that, between 1987 and 2003, fires burned an area 6. 5 times larger than the area burned between 1970 and 1986. The fire season also started earlier-, and its average length increased by 78 days. Warmer spring and summer temperatures appear to be part of the explanation for this change. The average temperature in the study's more recent period was 0.871 higher than it was in the earlier period. And this trend is likely to continue. Experts predict that average summer temperatures may rise between 23/4 and 53/4 by the year 2050 in western North America. Hie timing of snowmelt appears to be another cause of the fire boom. When snow melts early in the season,forests become drier through the summer and catch fire and burn more easily. Western snow packs now typically melt a week to a month earlier than they did 50 years ago, according to recent studies. Some people have blamed the growing fire risk on policies that allow bush and branches to build up on forest floors. But clearing bush by itself won' t help much if changes in climate are largely responsible for increasingly severe forest fires. Question: Clearing bush will help control the increasingly severe forest fires. What is the main idea the author aims to express in the passage? Options: A: The damages caused by wildfires. B: The results of a study on wild fires. C: The causes of fires in the United States. D: The changes in climate in the western United States.
B

(Question)
Read the article and select the best answer. Article: The human body has hundreds of muscles. The three types are skeletal muscles, smooth muscles and cardiac, or heart muscles. Each kind of muscle has a special job to do. The skeletal muscles are attached to the bones; they actually hold the skeleton together. Strong cords, called tendons , help connect these muscles to the bones. Skeletal muscles give us strength and allow us to move in many ways. If you look at skeletal muscles through a microscope, you will see that it has bands of fibers that look like stripes . These stripes are called striations. Skeletal muscles usually move because the brain has sent a conscious message to them telling them what to do. This is called voluntary movement. Another type of muscle is smooth muscle. Unlike skeletal muscle, smooth muscle does not have striations. This is found in organs such as the stomach, the bladder , the lungs and the eyes. Smooth muscles are smaller than the skeletal muscles and they move involuntarily. The brain tells these muscles what to do, but we aren't even aware of it. For example, we don't have to think about breathing or digesting food. The smooth muscles just do their jobs automatically. For this reason smooth muscles are sometimes called involuntary muscles. Like smooth muscle, cardiac muscle also works involuntarily. It is a very thick muscle that is found only in the walls of the heart. Its job is to pump blood out of the heart and into blood vessels called arteries . The arteries help carry the blood to all parts of the body. When the cardiac muscles relax, they let blood back into the heart. Cardiac muscles have striations, just like skeletal muscles do. Question: Skeletal muscles and heart muscles are alike because _ . Options: A: both can move voluntarily B: both are thick muscles C: both are bigger than smooth muscles D: both have stripes called striations
(Answer)
D

Ques: Read the article and select the best answer. Article: Along the river banks of the Amazon and the Orinoco there lives a bird that swims before it can fly, flies like a fat chicken, eats green leaves, has the stomach of a cow and has claws on its wings when young. They build their homes about 4.6m above the river, an important feature for the safety of the young. It is called the hoatzin. In appearance, the birds of both sexes look very much alike with brown on the back and cream and red on the underside. The head is small, with a large set of feathers on the top, bright red eyes, and blue skin. Its nearest relatives are the common birds, cuckoos. Its most striking feature, though, is only found in the young. Baby hoatzins have a claw on the leading edge of each wing and another at the end of each wing tip. Using these four claws, together with the beak , they can climb about in the bushes, looking very much like primitive birds must have done. When the young hoatzins have learned to fly, they lose their claws. During the drier months between December and March hoatzins fly about the forest in groups of 20 to 30 birds, but in April, when the rainy season begins, they collect together in smaller living units of two to seven birds for producing purposes. Question: Young hoatzins are different from their parents in that _ . Options: A: they look like young cuckoos B: they have claws on the wings C: they eat a lot like a cow D: they live on river banks
Ans: B

Ques: Read the article and select the best answer. Article: Many boys love reading about the legends of old pirates and dreaming of their own wild adventures. But modern pirates are not a thing of the past. Last month Somali pirates did their boldest hijacking to date. They seized the Saudi supertanker Sirius Star carrying crude oil worth about $100 million. They demanded $15 million to free the ship and its crew. The pirates have kept hitting the headlines this year: 92 attacks have been attempted, with 36 successful hijackings and 268 crew members taken hostage . The Chinese fishing ship Tianyu 8, with 17 Chinese and 8 foreigners on board, has been in their hands since November 14. Of course piracy is nothing new. Even since there has been water and ships there have been pirates. The earliest documented history of pirates dates back to the 13thcentury in the Mediterranean Sea. Even the famous Roman emperor Julius Caesar was once kidnapped by pirates. Piracy reached its peak in the mid-1700s. It was during this time in the Caribbean and off the coast of Africa that men like "Blackbeard the Pirate" made this profession attractive. But with the creation of stronger national Navies piracy became less popular around the world. In the mid-20thcentury, most pirates were petty thieves. They used hooks to sneak on board ships at anchor, and grabbed all that they could find. _ However, nowadays piracy has become a multi-million-dollar business at tracting many in poor countries. Pirates are treated like heroes among local fishermen. They use satellite phones and Global Positioning Systems (GPS). Once they spot their target, they swarm the ship with fast boats and shoot it by firing AK-47s or even rocket-propelled grenades . Then they hold the ship and its crews for money. "The world should take forceful actions together to fight piracy," said leaders at the Asian and Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Peru. "However, putting in anti-piracy army can only be half of the solution. We have to protect the fair chance of Somali fishermen to get a good... Question: When did piracy reach its peak? Options: A: In the 13 thcentury. B: In the mid-1700s. C: In the mid-20 thcentury. D: November 14, 2008.
Ans:
B