Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1. In bad weather, what should students think carefully about when it comes to
photography? Driving line
2. What does Brett want to take advantage of when photographing near water? Reflection
3. What can they avoid when they use a piece of equipment called an “angle finder”?
Snake’s pain
4. According to the tutor and Brett, whose works or paintings should they use to generate
ideas? Some designers
5. What issues should they think about when deciding on what to photograph?
Conservations problems.
IV. Listen to the recording and fill in the missing information with NO MORE THAN
THREE WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER for each answer. (20p.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HndV87XpkWg
IV. Write the correct FORM of each bracketed word in the spaces provided. (10p.)
The US Declaration of Independence contains the phrase 'life, (1. LIBERATE) liberty and
the pursuit of happiness' and implies that it is an (2. ALIEN) inalienable right (quyền k thể
bị tước đoạt) for every American citizen. But what is the pursuit of happiness exactly? It is
certainly a mellifluous phrase, one we like to hear and believe to be a possibility. But how
does one 'pursue' happiness and why is it in official documents? A more (3.
COMPREHEND) comprehensive analysis of the issue shows that while people are in
control of their (4. DESTINED) destiny to some extent, it is also the government's role to
create the conditions necessary for an individual to flourish and consequently achieve
happiness. It is (5. OBLIGATION) obliged to remove obstacles which might bar a person
from being happy. Such an obstacle might be not having the right to speak out against (6.
FAVOUR) unfavourable (k thuận lợi) conditions, or not having the right to speak one's
mind.
For the pursuit of happiness to exist, education must be accessible to the masses, health care
must not be denied to anyone based on race or religion and people must have the
right to a fair (7. TRY) trial in a court to be heard by (8. Part) impartial fellow citizens.
The US hasn't always been perfect in its application of this principle, but the very fact that its
citizens can criticise the government for its practices without fear of (9. PERSECUTE)
persecution means that the principle is largely (10. HOLD) upheld(bảo vệ) and can stand
as a model for other countries.
III. Read the passage and choose the best answer to each question A, B, C or D. (10p.)
"Rising Sea Levels"
Perhaps the most pervasive climatic effect of global warming is rapid escalation of ice melt.
Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, portions of the South American Andes, and the Himalayas will
very likely lose most of their glacial ice within the next two decades, affecting local water
resources. Glacial ice continues its retreat in Alaska. NASA scientists determined that
Greenland's ice sheet is thinning by about 1 m per year. The additional meltwater, especially
from continental ice masses and glaciers, is adding to a rise in sea level worldwide. Satellite
remote sensing is monitoring global sea level, sea ice, and continental ice. Worldwide
measurements confirm that sea level rose during the last century.
Surrounding the margins of Antarctica, and constituting about 11% of its surface area, are
numerous ice shelves, especially where sheltering inlets or bays exist. Covering many
thousands of square kilometers, these ice shelves extend over the sea while still attached to
continental ice. The loss of these ice shelves does not significantly raise sea level, for they
already displace seawater. The concern is for the possible surge of grounded continental ice
that the ice shelves hold back from the sea.
Although ice shelves constantly break up to produce icebergs, some large sections have
recently broken free. In 1998 an iceberg (150 km by 35 km) broke off the Ronne Ice Shelf,
southeast of the Antarctic Peninsula. In March 2000 an iceberg tagged B-15 broke off the
Ross Ice Shelf (some 900 longitude west of the Antarctic Peninsula), measuring 300 km by
40 km. Since 1993, six ice shelves have disintegrated in Antarctica. About 8000 km of ice
shelf are gone, changing maps, freeing up islands to circumnavigation, and creating
thousands of icebergs. The Larsen Ice Shelf, along the east coast of the Antarctic Peninsula,
has been retreating slowly for years. Larsen-A suddenly disintegrated in 1995. In only 35
days in early 2002, Larsen-B collapsed into icebergs. This ice loss is likely a result of the
2.5°C temperature increase in the region in the last 50 years. In response to the increasing
warmth, the Antarctic Peninsula is sporting new vegetation growth, previously not seen there.
A loss of polar ice mass, augmented by melting of alpine and mountain glaciers (which
experienced more than a 30% decrease in overall ice mass during the last century) will affect
sea-level rise. The IPCC assessment states that "between one-third to one-half of the existing
mountain glacier mass could disappear over the next hundred years." Also, "there is
conclusive evidence for a worldwide recession of mountain glaciers ... This is among the
clearest and best evidence for a change in energy balance at the Earth's surface since the end
of the 19th century."
[A.] Sea-level rise must be expressed as a range of values that are under constant
reassessment. [B.] The 2001 IPCC forecast for global mean sea-level rise this century, given
regional variations, is from 0.11-0.88 m. [C.] The median value of 0.48 m is two to four
times the rate of previous increase. These increases would continue beyond 2100 even if
greenhouse gas concentrations are stabilized. [D.]
The Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, has kept ocean temperature
records since 1916. Significant temperature increases are being recorded to depths of more
than 300 m as ocean temperature records are set. Even the warming of the ocean itself will
contribute about 25% of sealevel rise, simply because of thermal expansion of the water. In
addition, any change in ocean temperature has a profound effect on weather and, indirectly,
on agriculture and soil moisture. In fact the ocean system appears to have delayed some
surface global warming during the past century through absorption of excess atmospheric neat.
A quick survey of world coastlines shows that even a moderate rise could bring changes of
unparalleled proportions. At stake are the river deltas, lowland coastal farming valleys, and
low-lying mainland areas, all contending with high water, high tides, and higher storm
surges. Particularly tragic social and economic consequences will affect small island states -
being able to adjust within their present country boundaries, disruption of biological systems,
loss of biodiversity, reduction in water resources, among the impacts. There could be both
internal and international migration of affected human populations, spread over decades, as
people move away from coastal flooding from the sea-level rise.
IV. Read the text and do the following tasks. (10p.) (IELTS Trainer / 29)
THE ROBOTS ARE COMING - OR ARE THEY?
What is the current state of play in Artificial Intelligence?
A. Can robots advance so far that they become the ultimate threat to our existence? Some
scientists say no, and dismiss the very idea of Artificial Intelligence. The human brain,
they argue, is the most complicated system ever created, and any machine designed to
reproduce human thought is bound to fail. Physicist Roger Penrose of Oxford University
and others believe that machines are physically incapable of human thought. Colin
McGinn of Rutgers University backs this up when he says that Artificial Intelligence is
like sheep trying to do complicated psychoanalysis. They just don't have the conceptual
equipment they need in their limited brains'.
B. Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is different from most technologies in that scientists still
understand very little about how intelligence works. Physicists have a good
understanding of Newtonian mechanics and the quantum theory of atoms and molecules,
whereas the basic laws of intelligence remain a mystery. But a sizeable number of
mathematicians and computer scientists, who are specialists in the area, are optimistic
about the possibilities. To them it is only a matter of time before a thinking machine
walks out of the laboratory. Over the years, various problems have impeded all efforts to
create robots. To attack these difficulties, researchers tried to use the 'top-down
approach', using a computer in an attempt to program all the essential rules onto a single
disc. By inserting this into a machine, it would then become self-aware and attain human-
like intelligence.
C. In the 1950s and 1960s great progress was made, but the shortcomings of these prototype
robots soon became clear. They were huge and took hours to navigate across a room.
Meanwhile, a fruit fly, with a brain containing only a fraction of the computing power,
can effortlessly navigate in three dimensions. Our brains, like the fruit fly's,
unconsciously recognise what we see by performing countless calculations. This
unconscious awareness of patterns is exactly what computers are missing. The second
problem is robots' lack of common sense. Humans know that water is wet and that
mothers are older than their daughters. But there is no mathematics that can express these
truths. Children learn the intuitive laws of biology and physics by interacting with the
real world. Robots know only what has been programmed into them.
D. Because of the limitations of the top-down approach to Artificial Intelligence, attempts
have been made to use a 'bottom-up' approach instead - that is, to try to imitate evolution
and the way a baby learns. Rodney Brooks was the director of MIT's Artificial
Intelligence laboratory, famous for its lumbering 'topdown' walking robots. He changed
the course of research when he explored the unorthodox idea of tiny 'insectoid' robots
that learned to walk by bumping into things instead of computing mathematically the
precise position of their feet. Today many of the descendants of Brooks' insectoid robots
are on Mars gathering data for NASA (The National Aeronautics and Space
Administration), running across the dusty landscape of the planet. For all their successes
in mimicking the behaviour of insects, however, robots using neural networks have
performed miserably when their programmers have tried to duplicate in them the
behaviour of higher organisms such as mammals. MIT's Marvin Minsky summarises the
problems of AI: 'The history of AI is sort of funny because the first real accomplishments
were beautiful things, like a machine that could do well in a maths course. But then we
started to try to make machines that could answer questions about simple children's
stories. There's no machine today that can do that.'
E. There are people who believe that eventually there will be a combination between the
top-down and bottom-up, which may provide the key to Artificial Intelligence. As adults,
we blend the two approaches. It has been suggested that our emotions represent the
quality that most distinguishes us as human, that it is impossible for machines ever to
have emotions. Computer expert Hans Moravec thinks that in the future robots will be
programmed with emotions such as fear to protect themselves so that they can signal to
humans when their batteries are running low, for example. Emotions are vital in
decision-making. People who have suffered a certain kind of brain injury lose the ability
to experience emotions and become unable to make decisions. Without emotions to guide
them, they debate endlessly over their options. Moravec points out that as robots become
more intelligent and are able to make choices, they could likewise become paralysed with
indecision. To aid them, robots of the future might need to have emotions hardwired into
their brains.
F. There is no universal consensus as to whether machines can be conscious, or even, in
human terms, what consciousness means. Minsky suggests the thinking process in our
brain is not localised but spread out, with different centres competing with one another at
any given time. Consciousness may then be viewed as a sequence of thoughts and images
issuing from these different, smaller 'minds', each one competing for our attention.
Robots might eventually attain a 'silicon consciousness', Robots, in fact, might one day
embody an architecture for thinking and processing information that is different from
ours - but also indistinguishable. If that happens, the question of whether they really
'understand' becomes largely irrelevant. A robot that has perfect mastery of syntax, for all
practical purposes, understands what is being said.
Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A-F.
1. an insect that proves the superiority of natural intelligence over Artificial Intelligence C
2. robots being able to benefit from their mistakes D
3. many researchers not being put off believing that Artificial Intelligence will eventually
be developed B
4. the possibility of creating Artificial Intelligence being doubted by some academics A
5. no generally accepted agreement of what our brains do F
Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each
answer.
When will we have a thinking machine?
Despite some advances, the early robots had certain (6) __weaknesses_. They were given the
information they needed on a (7) _disc__. This was known as the 'top-down' approach and
enabled them to do certain tasks but they were unable to recognise (8) _patterns__. Nor did
they have any intuition or ability to make decisions based on experience. Rodney Brooks
tried a different (9) _approach__. Robots similar to those invented by Brooks are to be found
on (10) _Mars__ where they are collecting information.
Your answers
1. …………… 2. …………… 3. …………… 4. …………… 5. ……………
6. …………… 7. …………… 8. …………… 9. …………… 10. ……………
V. Read the text below and answer questions 1-10. (10p.) (Succeed in Cambridge English Advanced/142)
You are going to read some extracts from a health advice magazine. Choose from the
extracts (A-F). The extracts may be chosen more than once.
In which extract is the following mentioned?
1. People may be unaware of something that is causing disease in their body. D
2. Cutting back too much can be harmful. C
3. If you feel self-conscious, this could be for you. E
4. A shocking hygiene confession is made. A
5. This could be a flexible way to monitor your activity and performance levels. E
6. A change in body reaction could be dangerous. C
7. Drastic measures may not achieve the expected results. B
8. You should reassess your lifestyle to see if it is causing a bad habit. F
9. People need to be aware of the dangers of something that seems safe. B
10. A high-profile health problem boosts manufacturers' turnover.D
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II. Report writing (15p.)
The charts gives information about Covid- 19 vaccination figures in Vietnam in 2021.
Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make
comparisons where relevant.
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