Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 35 to 42.

What unusual or unique biological train led to the remarkable diversification and unchallenged success of the ants for over 50 million years? The answer appears to be that they were the first group of predatory eusocial insects that both lived and foraged primarily in the soil and in rotting vegetation on the ground. Eusocial refers to a form of insect society characterized by specialization of tasks and cooperative care of the young; it is rare among insects. Richly organized colonies of the land made possible by eusociality enjoy several key advantages over solitary individuals.

Under most circumstances groups of workers are better able to forage for food and defend the nest, because they can switch from individual to group response and back again swiftly and according to need. When a food object or nest intruder is too large for one individual to handle, nestmates can be quickly assembled by alarm or recruitment signals. Equally important is the fact that the execution of multiple-step tasks is accomplished in a series-parallel sequence. That is, individual ants can specialize in particular steps, moving from one object (such as a larva to be fed) to another (a second larva to be fed). They do not need to carry each task to completion from start to finish - for example, to check the larva first, then collect the food, then feed the larva. Hence, if each link in the chain has many workers in attendance, a sense directed at any particular object is less likely to fail. Moreover, ants specializing in particular labor categories typically constitute a caste specialized by age or body form or both. There has been some documentation of the superiority in performance and net energetic yield of various castes for their modal tasks, although careful experimental studies are still relatively few.

What makes ants unusual in the company of eusocial insects is the fact that they are the only eusocial predators (predators are animals that capture and feed on other animals) occupying the soil and ground litter. The eusocial termites live in the same places as ants and also have wingless workers, but they feed almost exclusively on dead vegetation.

(Source: TOEFL Reading)

Which of the following questions does the passage primarily answer?

A. Why have ants been able to thrive for such a long time?

B. What are the differences between social and solitary insects?

C. How do individual ants adapt to specialized tasks?

D. Why are ants predators?

* Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 43 to 50.

  All over the country, young people are entering a world of homelessness and poverty, according to a recent report by the housing group, Shelter.

  Nearly 150,000 young people aged between sixteen and twenty-five will become homeless this year, says Shelter. Some of the young homeless may sleep out in the open in such places as the “cardboard city” in London, where people of all ages sleep in the open air in their only home - cardboard boxes. Others may find accommodation in shelters run by voluntary organisations or get a place in a hostel, which gives them board up to ten weeks.

  But who are these people? Those who are seeking a roof over their heads are mostly not runaways but “throwaways” — people who have been thrown out of their homes or forced to leave because of parental divorce, an unsympathetic step-parent or one of many other reasons.

  Take the case of one six teen-year-old schoolgirl, Alice. She did not come from a poor home and had just passed her exams with good results. The Shelter team met her in a hostel where she was doing her physics homework. Her parents had thrown her out of her home for no other reason that she wanted to do Science Advanced Level Exams - which her parents refused her permissionjo do, saying that studying sciences was unladylike!

  Shelter says that the government’s laws do nothing to help these youngsters. Rising rents, the shortage of cheap housing and the cut in benefits for young people under the age of twenty-five are causing a national problem, according to Shelter. The recent changes in the benefit laws mean that someone aged between sixteen and twenty-five gets less than older people and they can only claim state help if they prove that they left home for a good reason.

  Shelter believes that because of the major cuts in benefits to young people, more and more are being forced to sleep on the streets. Shelter also points out that if you are homeless, you can’t get a job because employers will not hire someone without a permanent address; and if you can’t get a job, you are homeless because you don’t have any money to pay for accommodation. It’s an impossible situation.

(Source: FCE success workbook)

The word “Others” in paragraph 2 refers to_________

A. people of all ages

B. young people 

C. the young homeless

D. voluntary organisations

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the following questions.

Our teacher would like ______ ____________. 

A. that we practicing our pronunciation 

B. we to practice our pronunciation 

C. us to practice our pronunciation 

D. us practicing our pronunciation 

* Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 43 to 50.

  All over the country, young people are entering a world of homelessness and poverty, according to a recent report by the housing group, Shelter.

  Nearly 150,000 young people aged between sixteen and twenty-five will become homeless this year, says Shelter. Some of the young homeless may sleep out in the open in such places as the “cardboard city” in London, where people of all ages sleep in the open air in their only home - cardboard boxes. Others may find accommodation in shelters run by voluntary organisations or get a place in a hostel, which gives them board up to ten weeks.

  But who are these people? Those who are seeking a roof over their heads are mostly not runaways but “throwaways” — people who have been thrown out of their homes or forced to leave because of parental divorce, an unsympathetic step-parent or one of many other reasons.

  Take the case of one six teen-year-old schoolgirl, Alice. She did not come from a poor home and had just passed her exams with good results. The Shelter team met her in a hostel where she was doing her physics homework. Her parents had thrown her out of her home for no other reason that she wanted to do Science Advanced Level Exams - which her parents refused her permissionjo do, saying that studying sciences was unladylike!

  Shelter says that the government’s laws do nothing to help these youngsters. Rising rents, the shortage of cheap housing and the cut in benefits for young people under the age of twenty-five are causing a national problem, according to Shelter. The recent changes in the benefit laws mean that someone aged between sixteen and twenty-five gets less than older people and they can only claim state help if they prove that they left home for a good reason.

  Shelter believes that because of the major cuts in benefits to young people, more and more are being forced to sleep on the streets. Shelter also points out that if you are homeless, you can’t get a job because employers will not hire someone without a permanent address; and if you can’t get a job, you are homeless because you don’t have any money to pay for accommodation. It’s an impossible situation.

(Source: FCE success workbook)

The word “permanent” in the last paragraph is closest in meaning to__________.

A. stable

B. flexible

C. obvious

D. simple

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the following questions.

The Giant Panda has been on the ______ of extinction for many years. 

A. border 

B. verge 

C. margin 

D. rim 

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the sentence that is closest in meaning to each of the following questions

Bali has far better beaches than Java, which makes it more attractive to tourists

A. Bali is more popular with tourists because it has more beaches than Java

B. Bali attracts more tourists than Java because it has more beaches than Java

C. Tourirsts prefer the beaches in Bali to those in Bali because they are nearer

D. Bali is more popular with tourists because its beaches are much better than those of Java

Mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the sentence that is closest in meaning to each of the following questions

It was not until after I got home that I realized that I had not set the burglar alarm in the office.

A. Fortunately, I realized that I hadn’t set the burglar alarm just before I left for home; otherwise, I would have had to travel all the way back to the office.

B. On the way home, I suddenly realized that I had forgotten to turn on the burglar alarm in the office.

C. I didn’t turn the burglar alarm on before I left the office, but I only became aware of this after I’d arrived home.

D. I wish I had realized before I arrived home that I hadn’t turned on the burglar alarm in the office, then it would have been easier to go and set it.

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 30 to 34.

Genetic modification of foods is not a new practice. It has been practiced for thousands of years under the name of "selective breeding". Animals and plants were chosen because they had traits that humans found useful. Some animals were larger and stronger than others, or they yielded more food, or they had some other trait that humans valued. Therefore, they were bred because of those traits. Individuals with those traits were brought together and allowed to breed in the hope that their offspring would have the same traits in greater measure.

Much the same thing was done with plants. To produce bigger or sweeter fruit, or grow more grain per unit of land, strains of plants were combined and recombined to produce hybrids, or crossbreeds that had the desired traits in the right combinations. All the while, however, biologists wondered: is there a more direct and versatile way to change the traits of plants and animals? Could we rewrite, so to speak, the heredity of organisms to make them serve our needs better?

In the 20th century, genetic modification made such changes possible at last. Now, it was possible to alter the genetic code without using the slow and uncertain process of selective breeding. It even became possible to blend plants and animals genetically: to insert animal genes into plants, for example, in order to give the plants a certain trait they ordinarily would lack, such as resistance to freezing. The result was a tremendous potential to change the very nature of biology.

Which of the following IS NOT achieved by genetic modification?

A. Giving plants necessary traits taken from animals’ genes

B. Producing hybrids or crossbreeds from many animals and plants

C. Encouraging people to give up selective breeding completely

D. Making big changes to the very nature of biology

Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 35 to 42.

What unusual or unique biological train led to the remarkable diversification and unchallenged success of the ants for over 50 million years? The answer appears to be that they were the first group of predatory eusocial insects that both lived and foraged primarily in the soil and in rotting vegetation on the ground. Eusocial refers to a form of insect society characterized by specialization of tasks and cooperative care of the young; it is rare among insects. Richly organized colonies of the land made possible by eusociality enjoy several key advantages over solitary individuals.

Under most circumstances groups of workers are better able to forage for food and defend the nest, because they can switch from individual to group response and back again swiftly and according to need. When a food object or nest intruder is too large for one individual to handle, nestmates can be quickly assembled by alarm or recruitment signals. Equally important is the fact that the execution of multiple-step tasks is accomplished in a series-parallel sequence. That is, individual ants can specialize in particular steps, moving from one object (such as a larva to be fed) to another (a second larva to be fed). They do not need to carry each task to completion from start to finish - for example, to check the larva first, then collect the food, then feed the larva. Hence, if each link in the chain has many workers in attendance, a sense directed at any particular object is less likely to fail. Moreover, ants specializing in particular labor categories typically constitute a caste specialized by age or body form or both. There has been some documentation of the superiority in performance and net energetic yield of various castes for their modal tasks, although careful experimental studies are still relatively few.

What makes ants unusual in the company of eusocial insects is the fact that they are the only eusocial predators (predators are animals that capture and feed on other animals) occupying the soil and ground litter. The eusocial termites live in the same places as ants and also have wingless workers, but they feed almost exclusively on dead vegetation.

(Source: TOEFL Reading)

The word "unique" in paragraph 1 is closest in meaning to ______.

A. natural

B. habitual 

C. inherited 

D. singular