Ques: Read the article and select the best answer. Article: Your particular relationships with your parents, not God or genes, determines your academic performance. In my case, it was my father who made the difference. I had three sisters and my father never showed much interest in their success. He took no notice of the school reports of one of them. They all made it to university. But this was largely because of my mother's encouragement. However badly I did, and it was usually very bad, he always told me I was clever and that I could do well. When I was eight and remained at the bottom of my class, he tried to coach me in Latin and maths. His main goal was to show me that, if I could make myself concentrate on the dull tasks, I could do them. He chose the head of my house at public school with great care. He found a man who made a huge effort to teach _ with which he started when I was 13. Together, they convinced me to take exams seriously. But the most important factor was that I knew my dad loved me. He expressed this in many kind letters. When we were together, he would take me in his arms. He encouraged me to think for myself and to enjoy what I enjoyed. He once watched me eating a huge amount of chocolate and said, "Eat as much as you like -- you won't always enjoy it that much." So I started working hard. I agreed with his own clever ways. And I started to enjoy the learning of knowledge and the expression of ideas. Although exams gave little opportunity for that, I could sort of see _ . A lot of parents do not realize how important the emotional aspect of the relationship is. It determines their child's performance. I recently heard a parent discussing what school their child might get into. "I don't know how bright he is," she said. Many parents are troubled by their children's marks at school. Their relationship with the child is almost wholly built around this. It was not at all like that with my dad. Until I was eight, he did not seem to worry about marks. And, after that, it was never exam performance that he was concerned... Question: Which of the following statements is NOT true about "my father"? Options: A: He was good at Latin and maths. B: He used to write letters to encourage me. C: He paid much attention to my school marks. D: He paid little attention to my sisters' school reports.
Ans: C

Ques: Read the article and select the best answer. Article: Men are spending more and more time in the kitchen encouraged by celebrity chefs like Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver, according to a report from Oxford University. The effect of the celebrity role models, who have given cooking a more manly picture, has combined with a more general drive towards sexual equality and men now spend more than twice the amount of time preparing meals than they did in 1961. According to the research by Prof. Jonatahn Gershuny, who runs the Centre for Time Research at Oxford, men now spend more than half an hour a day cooking, up from just 12 minutes a day in 1961. Prof. Gershuny said, "The man in the kitchen is part of a much wider social trend. There has been 40 years of sexual equality, but there is another 40 years probably to come." Women, who a generation ago spent nearly two hours a day cooking, now spend just one hour and seven minutes--a great fall, but they still spend far more time in the kitchen than men. Some experts have named these men in aprons as "Gastrosexuals (men using cooking skills to impress friends)", who have been inspired to pick up a kitchen knife by the success of Ramsay, Oliver as well as other male celebrity chefs such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Marco Pierre White and Keith Floyd. "I was married in 1974. When my father came to visit me a few weeks later, I was wearing an apron when I opened the door. He laughed," said Prof. Gershuny. "That would never happen now." Two-thirds of adults say that they come together to share at least three times a week, even if it is not necessarily around a kitchen or dining room table. Prof. Gershuny pointed out that the family meal was now rarely eaten by all of its members around a table--with many "family meals" in fact taken on the sofa in the sitting room, and shared by family members. "The family meal has changed a lot, and few of us eat--as I did when I was a child--at least two meals a day together as a family. But it has survived in a different format." Question: How did Prof. Gershuny see the family meal according to the passage? Options: A: It has become a thing of the past. B: It is very different from what it used to be. C: It shouldn't be advocated in modern times. D: It is beneficial to the stability of the family.
Ans: B

Ques: Read the article and select the best answer. Article: The evidence for harmony may not be obvious in some families. But it seems that four out of five young people now get on well with their parents, which is the opposite of the popularly-held image of unhappy teenagers locked in their room after endless family quarrels. An important new study into teenage attitudes surprisingly shows that their family life is more harmonious than it had ever been in the past. "We were surprised by just how positive today's young people seem to be about their families," said one number of the research team. "They're expected to be rebellious and selfish but actually they have other things on their minds: they want a car and material goods, and they worry about whether school is serving them well. There's more negotiation and discussion between parents and children, and children expect to take part in the family decision-making process. They don't want to rock the boat." So it seems that this generation of parents is much more likely than parents of 30 years ago to treat their children as friends. "My parents are happy to discuss things with me and willing to listen to me," says 17-year-old Daniel Lazall. "I always tell them when I'm going out clubbing. As long as they know what I'm doing, they're fine with me." Susan Crome, who is now 21, agrees. "Looking back on the last 10 years, there was a lot of what you could call negotiation. For example, as long as I'd done all my homework, I could go out on a Saturday night. But I think my grandparents were a lot stricter with my parents than that." Maybe this positive view of family life should not be unexpected. It is possible that the idea of teenage rebellion is not rooted in real facts. A researcher comments, "Our surprise that teenagers say they get along well with their parents comes because of a brief period in our social history when teenagers were regarded as different beings. But that idea of rebelling and breaking away from their parents really happened during that one time in the 1960s when everyone rebelled. The normal... Question: What is the passage mainly about? Options: A: Negotiation in family. B: Education in family. C: Harmony in family. D: Teenage trouble in family.
Ans:
C