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Read the following article and select the best answer. Article: Of the 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are likely to disappear this century. In fact, one falls out of use about every two weeks. Some languages die out in an instant, at the death of the only surviving speaker. Others are lost gradually in bilingual cultures, as local tongues are edged out by the dominant language at school, in the marketplace and on television. New research, supported by the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, has found the five regions where languages are disappearing most rapidly. They are northern Australia, central South America, North America's upper Pacific coastal zone, eastern Siberia, and Oklahoma and the southwestern United States. K. David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College, US, said that more than half the languages had no written form and were _ to loss and being forgotten." Their loss leaves no dictionary, no text, or no record of the accumulated knowledge and history of a disappeared culture. Harrison and other researchers started their rescue project last year. They have been trying to identify and record endangered languages. They interviewed and made recordings of the few remaining speakers of a language and collected basic word lists. The individual projects, some lasting three to four years, involve hundreds of hours of recording speech, developing grammar and preparing children's readers in the obscure language. The research has concentrated on preserving entire language families. "These are probably languages that cannot be brought back, but at least we made records of them," said Gregory Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute, in Oregon, US. Question: What does the passage mainly tell us? - Many languages are quickly disappearing. - Some languages are disappearing because they are hard to remember. - Chinese is one of the languages that are disappearing. - Thanks to some researchers, many endangered languages have been rescued.
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Many languages are quickly disappearing.

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Read the following article and select the best answer. Article: One of the sailors who sailed with Christopher Columbus on his second voyage to the New World was a man named Juan Ponce de Leon. This voyage changed his life. He decided to stay when Columbus returned. Ponce was named governor of Puerto Rico (then called Boriquien) in 1508. While there, he heard many stories of a magical water source. People called it the Fountain of Youth and said that drinking its water kept you young. For the next few years, Ponce tried to find out where the Fountain of Youth was. He asked permission from Spain's King Charles V to go in search of it. The king _ , as long as Ponce paid for the ships and crew himself. The young explorer did so readily, and they set off. It was March 1513. They sailed for days but didn't see the fountain. On March 27, he came within sight of the Florida coast. On April 2, he landed at what he named St. Augustine. This was the first Spanish settlement on the mainland of North America. He had several adventures along the way. He did not, however, find the Fountain of Youth. He returned to Boriquien. He continued to govern tile island, and he continued to hear stories of the Fountain of Youth. Finally, in 1521, he set out again. This time, he landed on the Florida coast again. While he and his men were building houses for a new settlement, they were attacked by native tribesmen . Many of his men died, but Ponce escaped, although he was injured. He reached Cuba and entered a hospital, where he died of wounds from the attack in Florida. Juan Ponce de Leon never found the Fountain of Youth. Neither did anyone else, at least as far as we know. Question: Ponce's voyage to the New World with Columbus _ . - affected his future life greatly - made him forget the way back - was supported by Charles V financially - was to find the Fountain of Youth
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affected his future life greatly

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Read the following article and select the best answer. Article: A small piece of fish each day may keep the heart doctor away. That's the finding of a study of Dutch men in which deaths from heart disease were more than 50 percent lower among those who consumed at least an ounce of salt water fish per day compared to those who never ate fish. The Dutch research is one of three human studies that give strong scientific support to the long held belief that eating fish can provide health benefits, particularly to the heart. Heart disease is the number-one killer in the United States, with more than 550,000deaths occurring from heart attacks each year. But previous research has shown that the level of heart disease is lower in cultures that consume more fish than Americans do. There are fewer heart disease deaths, for example, among the Eskimos of Greenland, who consume about 14 ounces of fish a day, and among the Japanese, whose daily fish consumption averages more than 3 ounces. For 20 years, the Dutch study followed 852 middle-aged men, 20 percent of whom ate no fish. At the start of the study, average fish consumption was about two-thirds of an ounce each day, with more men eating lean fish than fatty fish. During the next two decades, 78of the men died from heart disease , The fewest deaths were among the group who regularly ate fish, even at levels far lower than those of the Japanese of Eskimos, This _ was true regardless of other factors such as age, high blood pressure, or blood cholesterol levels. Question: We can infer from the passage that there are fewer heart disease deaths _ . - in Dutch - in America - in countries with high consumption of fish - in countries with good production of fish
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in countries with high consumption of fish